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I know it happens to the best of us, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.
August 17th, 2008
Today was one of those days all writers dread: the notorious “Holy mother of Jehosephat! Burn this before someone reads it!” day.
I know it happens to all writers. Virginia Wolf, Jane Austen, May Sarton, Doris Lessing, Tolstoy’s wife. All of them had days when rereading their writing made them shake their heads and go sign up for classes on gas pumping.
But that doesn’t make me feel any better when it happens to me.
The worst part is the feeling I’ve let my characters and their fabulous stories down. “This could be so amazingly awesome,” they seem to say to me, tears of rage standing in their eyes, “and look what you’ve done. It’s like reading a thesis on sewage processing.”
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A writer friend once told me that he combats writer’s block or stale language by periodically changing his medium.
He bought a ’steampunk’ computer (says it lent a feeling of gravitas to the act of typing that was absent on a traditional computer), and he also uses speech recognition programs so he can just speak his text to the computer, which allows him more freedom to experiment with stream of consciousness, which he then edits later on.
Interesting how writers have different strategies for breaking out of ruts. My ruts usually have to do with getting tangled up in my language for one reason or another. To break out, I have to get pissed off and then just write the scene in very simple, straight-forward style, knowing I can go back later and rewrite.