This week has been an incredibly productive week. If, by...

This week has been an incredibly productive week. 

 If, by productive, you were to count everything except for writing…

Oh, that crocheting up there? Yeah, that’s what’s keeping me awake at night. Plans for Mother’s Day presents and a table cloth crocheted together in various different hook sizes until I found one I liked. 

Plot bunnies? What plot bunnies?

The glamorous part of writing that nobody ever talks about is the writer’s block. And it’s hilarious that this happened this week, literally days after I saw Warren Ellis posting this: 

This is the part of the job that doesn’t get talked about a lot, not least because it’s hard to talk about, but also because it doesn’t involve Productivity and Goals and The Magic Of Writering and The Grand Statement and all that good stuff in interviews. Sure, we all talk about the important Staring At The Wall And Farting Around time, but it’s also about sifting through the shitpile at the back of your head and deciding if you actually have anything to say.  Any idiot can recycle the monomyth and plug in a setting and a handful of blank characters, but that’s not the same as having something to say: about the world, life, a thing, even yourself. I have a whole folder of loose ideas that dried up and got thrown in the folder because they and I turned out to have nothing to say about anything - they were just collections of cogs and levers.  And by that, I mean probably eight to ten dead ideas, written up and filed, for every one that gets published.

Well. Hilarious may be too strong a word. 

I realised, when I pulled out my laptop today, that I wasn’t interested in the part of the story I was telling. And I thought to myself that, if I didn’t want to tell it, what were the chances of other people wanting to read it? 

So I wrote down the sections of the story that were boring me, things that needed to happen for the plot to go forward, but things that didn’t necessarily need to be shown. 

The whole writerly industry is all about show over tell, but sometimes the showing just isn’t going to get you there.

And today I’ve written 2 totally new chapters and I’m at the end of the first scene of my Twitter conversation new trans superhero novella. Which is good, because there is now story there to edit if I figure out later on that I need to show rather than tell this troublesome bit of plot.