Writing and the I Cant's
I've had real problems writing this week, partly due to sinus headache issues, and partly because I had an attack of the "I can'ts" and I didn't realize I was having it.
It's kind of like imposter syndrome, where you're convinced that you're just faking your ability to do your job, despite massive piles of evidence to the contrary. The "I can'ts" is where you are convinced that you can't figure out the details of the next sequence of scenes even though you've already written 90,000 words of the book, plus a bunch of other books, stories, etc. Yes, it's illogical, no, it doesn't make any sense, but neither does imposter syndrome and writer's block and a lot of other things. (Things that are also aggravated by OCD and anxiety issues, both of which I have.)
And it doesn't help that sometimes you really do get stuck in figuring out a plot, because you're going in the wrong direction, you haven't set things up properly, because something is really wrong that needs to be fixed somewhere else.
So you know, there I am, with a sinus headache that is distracting anyway and convinced that this book would never be finished because I am suddenly rendered incapable of figuring out a sequence of action scenes even though I have done it like a million times before. (And of course, you don't articulate it to yourself because if you did, it would sound stupid and you would realize how stupid it is. It's just there in your head, an unexamined conviction that's paralyzing you, an invisible obstruction on a dark road.)
And then I decided to look at another file I was completely stuck on despite the fact that I worked on it yesterday, got distracted by something on TV, wrote a sentence and then wrote three pages before I really noticed what I was doing. Which made me start to suspect that what I was actually having was a case of "I can't do this" rather than a complete systems failure of my writing brain.
Then I went back to the book and forced myself to write the two sentences where I actually knew what was going to happen, and ended up blocking out the scenes I needed in about five minutes.
So if you are stuck, you really do have to learn to examine the reasons you're stuck, and see if there is actually a real issue that needs to be dealt with, or it's just an invisible roadblock that dissolves once you bang into it hard enough.
In the bad news department, I still have a sinus headache.
***
In case anybody missed it:
The Serpent Sea is available for preorder and there's new short story on the web site set in the same world as The Cloud Roads.
It's kind of like imposter syndrome, where you're convinced that you're just faking your ability to do your job, despite massive piles of evidence to the contrary. The "I can'ts" is where you are convinced that you can't figure out the details of the next sequence of scenes even though you've already written 90,000 words of the book, plus a bunch of other books, stories, etc. Yes, it's illogical, no, it doesn't make any sense, but neither does imposter syndrome and writer's block and a lot of other things. (Things that are also aggravated by OCD and anxiety issues, both of which I have.)
And it doesn't help that sometimes you really do get stuck in figuring out a plot, because you're going in the wrong direction, you haven't set things up properly, because something is really wrong that needs to be fixed somewhere else.
So you know, there I am, with a sinus headache that is distracting anyway and convinced that this book would never be finished because I am suddenly rendered incapable of figuring out a sequence of action scenes even though I have done it like a million times before. (And of course, you don't articulate it to yourself because if you did, it would sound stupid and you would realize how stupid it is. It's just there in your head, an unexamined conviction that's paralyzing you, an invisible obstruction on a dark road.)
And then I decided to look at another file I was completely stuck on despite the fact that I worked on it yesterday, got distracted by something on TV, wrote a sentence and then wrote three pages before I really noticed what I was doing. Which made me start to suspect that what I was actually having was a case of "I can't do this" rather than a complete systems failure of my writing brain.
Then I went back to the book and forced myself to write the two sentences where I actually knew what was going to happen, and ended up blocking out the scenes I needed in about five minutes.
So if you are stuck, you really do have to learn to examine the reasons you're stuck, and see if there is actually a real issue that needs to be dealt with, or it's just an invisible roadblock that dissolves once you bang into it hard enough.
In the bad news department, I still have a sinus headache.
***
In case anybody missed it:
The Serpent Sea is available for preorder and there's new short story on the web site set in the same world as The Cloud Roads.
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