Derailed!
Thursday, September 25th, 2008My word count on my novel will be pathetically miniscule this week, as I have suffered a major setback. That setback was not medical, mental, or spiritual. It was merely a side-effect of my inability to focus on anything for any extended period of time.
Sometime this past weekend, I caught on a great (or so I thought) idea for a short story. And it wouldn’t leave my head, no matter how hard I shook it. It was bad enough, that I couldn’t concentrate on the novel, since the genres for the two concepts were diametrically opposed to each other. So, I told myself that I would take a day away from the novel to hammer out the short story, get it out of my head, and then carry on with the novel.
You can probably guess how that brilliant plan worked out.
Here I am, I haven’t touched the novel in three days, and I’ve been struggling to pull this threadbare short story concept together. I’ve pulled too much mental capacity away from the novel, and now even thinking about it makes me cringe.
Yep. I derailed myself.
All this situation does is serve as a gentle reminder to several great truths.
1) Writing is work. Let no one ever tell you any different.
2) Stopping one sort of writing to do another, different sort of writing does indeed kill motivation. Now I don’t just have someone’s word on it, I have personal experience to back me up.
3) The wife was right.
So, tomorrow I pull myself back up by the bootstraps and attempt to salvage this derailment before it becomes a full-blown train wreck. The short story gets shelved. The novel gets my full attention again. And I go back to work.
Right after the presidential debates. D’oh!
Good luck getting back on track with the novel! Sometimes what seems like a good idea just doesn’t pan out that way.
I hope you can dive right back and it all goes well.
Maybe in future you can look at those pretty shiny ideas waiting to be written as incentives to get your work done so you can move onto them rather than letting them tempt you into putting the current project on hold? I find that works for me quite well.
Anyways, best of luck
Writing is work. Let no one ever tell you any different.
I beg to differ. It’s not work, it’s ****ING HARD work.
I’m not kidding. Scientists have determined that you get more exhausted from four hours of writing than from twelve hours of chopping wood.
If you think about it a little, you’ll realize why so many famous authors were alcoholics or drug addicts. It’s because aspirin isn’t strong enough….
Just remember Ben Jonson’s Law: “None but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” And the writing that pays best is ransom notes….