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[pigwithhairfics]

The last nearly three months have been filled with writing fear. Oh, I can write fan fic and have been, but not my own stuff. I feel paralyzed, like all I write is total crap.

I think I'm finally working through it a bit. I've done up a new summary for this book I've been toiling with, changed the character names a few times and I've changed the

Comments

[exartemarte]

You have my sympathy.

I'm not trying to do anything more ambitious than write fan fic, but even that's impossible. I don't need to do it - I do it for fun, relaxation and the buzz I know I'll get if I manage to produce anything halfway decent. But it's not happening.

Tonight, for example, I've been trying to add to a story I started weeks ago. I got off to several false starts, only wrote about a hundred words, and ended up binning the lot. I've even had the odd quite nice idea, but it when I try to get it down it just comes out boring and banal. Complete. Utter. Crap. Thank heaven I don't have to earn my living this way - I'd starve!

I think I've become an ex writer.

[exartemarte]

That's pretty much where I am in terms of writing something and then scraping it. And yes, false starts.

Writing is something I crave doing, look forward to doing, I mean I'd rather be reading or writing than pretty much anything.

Do you really feel you're done with it or do you think it's a phase or a case of the muse going elsewhere or whatever?

I flirt with the idea of stopping when the frustration gets real high - like now - but I know I won't. I may be doomed to wasting thousands of hours writing crap, but I'll write. I hope you will; I've enjoyed some good fics from you.

[pigwithhairfics]

That comment was from me. I didn't realize I wasn't logged in.

[exartemarte]

I don't know what to think. I don't want to give up, and I probably won't, but you can only bash your head against a brick wall for so long

[rougered]

I'm happy to hear you feel like it's moving forward a bit. Writing fear is powerful. Sometimes it has more to do with performance anxiety, you know? Wanting to get something out in a specific way, and drowning every time we read the paragraph and measure the distance between what we have and where we want to be. It can be disheartening

[rougered]

And because I erased my last sentence by mistake, here it is *facepalm*:

I think the hardest thing to learn is to give ourselves some slack, and to find a way to be creative and playful when the writing fizzles for a while - maybe stories just need to be in the *cooler* for a while.

[pigwithhairfics]

Well, I'm definetely writing scared so if it's a good thing - all the better for me, I reckon. It's performance anxiety, which is dumb as I'm performing to myself, and something else, the old fear of wasting my time when I should be doing something else, something less selfish than writing. That bothers me a lot

[rougered]

I don't know if being writing scared is a *good* thing - why something so worrisome would be good for us, truly? - but I think it is in part the essence of what are forays into art and self-expression...tension