Monday's Keister Kick (I'm kicking my A**.. Do you Mind?)



Have you ever felt like this?


This is me today.. heck, I'm even an attorney.  I've been kicking my butt all weekend long.

So, we're here on Monday again, always seems to come along when you least expect it. Last week I was killing it on NaNoWriMo, and then one little stupid thing set me into a tailspin and I struggled all weekend.

The stupid thing.. a teeny tiny little revision.  I have a character in my WIP that's supposed to be the humorous sidekick.. but for some reason when I was writing, he ended up being a Middle Aged English Gentleman from the 18th Century.

Let me rephrase that.. I wrote about 5000 words with some middle aged old guy with a horrible accent into my WIP for no reason other than.. "Ooops."

So, thinking it was no big deal I decided to alter his appearance and change a couple of lines of dialogue to 'fix' my error.  Problem is.. once I started in with that, 10 dozen other 'little fixes' jumped into the picture and I was left just staring at them wondering if I just needed to blow the dang thing up and start from scratch..

.. again.

It's baffling to me how 1) I lost such tremendous focus on who my characters are, and 2) That one little thing seems to give me license to just question everything I've worked for and all the thoughts and plans I've obsessed over for months and months.

So.. if you wanna know what's kicking my Keister right now.. it's my own feelings of inadequacy and doubt.

I KNOW the fix.. I know that I need to just ignore it and keep writing. I know all of it, I've written them and said them dozens of times to myself over just this past weekend alone.. but this isn't a cliche' and it's not insurmountable block.

This is a decision.  All I have to do is make the decision to write, and I write.  It's that simple. All the BS, all the doubt and insecurity evaporates in the exact moment of creation.  On Thursday of last week I was on Cloud 9.. I was in a long wave of creation and it was great. I LOVED my scenes, my characters were speaking to me directly.  Then 2 days later they're lying flat on my page, lifeless.

So that's where I am today, and what's kicking my Keister.. but on the bright side, there is this....


Comments

  1. I love Liar Liar!

    I think part of your problem is that you second-guessed a decision you made while you were writing. Chances are that no matter what you had in mind when you started writing, the story demanded a different character than you'd envisioned. Not to contradict all that revision you just did...but you might have done it for nothing. You were trying to tell yourself something, and then you went back and told that version to tell yourself something else...Anyway, I hope it works out! Remember to have fun!

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  2. Oh my gosh... I just got out of the "I hate everything I write" stage. I know I'll be back there. (Probably tomorrow!) I've come to accept that it's just part of the cycle. Which is good! Just embrace it. The point is, like you said, that you just keep writing. You know this. You can/must go back *after* and fix the character. Right now focus on the vomiting. (Though I know how HARD that is!!!)

    Though this is my NaNo advice... for me in my normal writing, I prefer to fix as I go (no matter how many people tell me that's the "wrong" way!)

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