Saturday, April 28, 2012

Just Write

I've struggled off and on for the past few months with books and projects. I've set stuff aside, multiple times. I've wracked my brain on plotting and characterization and word choice on certain books--over thinking and over thinking, which for me leads to frustration, minimizing the screen and firing up Twitter. I've been in and heard of people being in writing funks before and they're brutal on you. So hard and stressful and if you're like me, you feel like you're doing nothing, if you're not writing. I also have a friend who has a great story idea and wants to try her hand at writing, but hasn't yet. I wonder if the solution can be really simple for us all... If you're a new writer or a writer in a funk or whatever the situation is, for me, the only way out of it is to-- JUST WRITE. I have a friend who is an editor and she's told me before, crap can be fixed. Just write. I think that's awesome advice. Of course everyone is different so you have to do what works for you, but for me? I need to just write. Can you write yourself out of a funk or do you need to separate yourself from writing to get back in the grove? If you're not a writer, this can go with other aspects of your life too. Are you the type to keep going until you push through or do you need to stop and regroup?

8 comments:

  1. I swear I could've written this myself. The funk of the last few months, the frustration and feel of having done nothing (regardless of how much non-writing stuff is accomplished), the need to just get on with it.

    Eesh.

    So glad to know I'm not the only one.

    Now off to punish the keyboard a little...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great advice! I find a deadline healps me write when I've got writer's block. Daydreaming also helps.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I tell people that all the time, and it's true. Rough drafts are supposed to suck...so just write them! Stop thinking so much and just write :P

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great advice! I really needed this.

    There's this great video posted on Veronica Roth's blog that I thought related to post. Watch it here:

    http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com/2012/01/such-good-advice.html

    ReplyDelete
  5. Like J Larkin, I swear I could have written this myself too :) I've been in writing funks before and usually I write through them. I feel a bit debilitated this time, though and I've decided to take an official break. It was good to read your post and some of the comments to learn that I'm not alone in the funk :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm in one of these funks right now. I've got queries out on one project (which is going frustratingly because I'm getting no responses/rejections, and the last project got mostly just requests for fulls and near misses with agents, so now I'm thinking stuff like 'How did my writing get worse???) and while the project I'm querying is stagnant, I'm trying to work on other projects, but since the current one is not producing exciting results, now I'm doubting myself. And while I write all YA, the project that was well received, was a dystopian, and the one that's not going anywhere is a contemporary. So now I have questions like 'should I not write contemporary, even though I have contemporary stories in me?' and 'Should I not write dystopians because one of the main reasons agents said they didn't offer to rep was because they felt dystopians were flooding the market?' floating around in my head

    Ugh, argh and blurgh. It's enough to make you nuts, those little weevils of doubt and uncertainty. My answer is to write whatever I feel like writing. I'm one of those people with a dozen stories of a dozen different kinds in various states of progress. I write on whichever one I feel like writing on. Or I write on none of them and work on editing one of several older projects that I think could see daylight some day. Sometimes I feel like creating, sometimes I feel like reworking/editing. But as long as I'm doing something, the day is a success.

    ReplyDelete
  7. My friend who has been writing for years told me this thousands of times last year as I was writing my novel. Good advice!

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm definitely at a point now where I need to "Just Write." I need to stop worrying about everything else and just get the story out of my head.

    ReplyDelete