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 On Writer's Blockage

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Sarah
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Sarah


Posts : 16
Join date : 2016-02-18
Age : 32
Location : Austin

On Writer's Blockage Empty
PostSubject: On Writer's Blockage   On Writer's Blockage EmptyJanuary 25th 2018, 11:00 pm

Details are tricky. They're essential to breathing life into my writing, attracting notice, but if done wrong, the words feel...too heavy. Description and establishment/exposition prose is so frustrating for me. I want everyone to see what I see, but I don't want to bore them with all the words it'll take to get us on the same page.

So I try to find the middle-ground. I look for scene hooks, and if I need to establish context, I prefer flashing back to some action or conversation to fill in the gaps. This is the thing, this is what I have to believe - if I'm bored, the reader is too. What do I want to hear or see? Or better yet, what do the characters want. If I'm struggling to understand that, I've found it helps to back up and just start scribbling out conversation between me and the character; I directly ask them what's going on, how they feel, what they want to do and what's holding them back, if anything. It cuts to the chase, it penetrates my own confusion and questions. It helps me finish what I've started.

But it's still slow. I can't see how I can speed up this process without sacrificing it. I'm an overthought jumble of...of opinions and questions and answers. Sometimes I know exactly what they are, but mostly I just open my mouth and talk until a certain someone shuts me up or tells me to get to the point and then shuts me up.

I'm burdened. There is an excess in my imagination. It's so big, so heavy and sluggish, nothing gets through to paper. This is writer's block. This is writer's doubt. This is why it's been weeks and I haven't even tried to write a specific scene I have in mind, all on my own.

It's important for me to identify this "blockage" here. I've paused to think about it. Using discipline or actual timers to make myself write faster or purge the blockage faster is...an unpleasant prospect. It would change writing into an additional problem to fix in my life, and I can't perceive it like that. I won't. Writing is my joy. My escape. If I'm slow, I'm slow. I can always identify how to improve it, or what holds me back, but it will never be a problem or a job. At least not so long as I'm dealing with such low self-esteem in my life, and my life routine. So many OTHER things need to change before I change how I approach writing.

I've had another think on it; if personal interaction with my own characters helps me clear blockage, by tackling details in an interesting and helpful, character-driven way, maybe I should "talk" to them about their own stories? And since it's meta-fiction with no context, it can permeate my routine regularly. I can scribble down the dialogue in a notebook, anywhere, anytime. This could definitely build up/sustain my interest in them, and lead me to writing down scenes. But this is all sounding really weird, like...questionable.

Not to mention:

Let's at least try. I'll start by picking one of the MANY journals I have and assigning it to this task. Productive conversations might end up in the Meta Fiction forum, and when I have time/laptop access, I might just start a topic there and let loose, see what comes of it. I hope this doesn't get weird.
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