Since I finished my full outline on HiS, I’ve barely written a word. Well 776 of them plus the ones that fell by the wayside on the way to that total. It’s not particularly gripping, and it is at least grammatically correct. And I got stuck (then I got sick, which didn’t help the stuck). I’ve whined to Pot about it, and bless her for listening to me. I said just last night that maybe I needed to write on something else entirely, just to get the words flowing again. I had something more like a writing prompt or a tangent for some other WIP in mind rather than the article that my boss dumped on me to write because she didn’t want to. Note to self: Must be more specific when speaking to Fates.
In any event, Alex Sokoloff made a post yesterday that echoed everything Pot has already said to me. Your first draft is always going to suck. The important thing is getting started and putting one foot in front of the other, one letter after another until you get to the end. And if you have to revise the hell out of it, so be it. But finish. And of course in order to finish you have to start!
I don’t know why I’ve got such a paralytic fear of getting back into this. It’s like my brain has forgotten how to do what I do. The blank page is…terrifying. I just need to dive back in. And I will deal with however much suck that entails. I’m never going to find their voices or the tone for this book until I start putting those subjects and verbs on screen.
Getting back to work.
UPDATE:
So I totally wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it. After writing the post, I opened up a blank Word file and had at it. I embraced the suck and poured out 848 words in a little over an hour. Totally rewrote the beginning. I think I’m going to have to use Word to do the actual writing. I’m conditioned to write there. The yWriter word processor just isn’t my schtick, though I absolutely love the program for everything else. So I’ve begun.