Wednesday 15 August 2007

Writer's Bricks

I don't think I ever have time to develop writer's block. When I'm writing, it happens in little snatches of stolen time, when I should doing something different or should be somewhere else. I do have a lot of problems getting things finished, but it's always because I have too many ideas, rather than too few. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to set my brain to just one channel, so I've got notes on a hundred different exciting plots, interesting characters and speculative 'what if's, and I carry round a stripy Paperchase pad for this purpose (though unlike Helen it doesn't have a band to keep it closed, so its pages are rather squashed in places...). I've been trying very hard recently to concentrate on one particular idea, and have got over 5000 words, spanning about two-thirds of the plot, though of course it will need an awful lot of expansion. But I'm beginning to think that trying to limit myself is a bad idea. If I'm not in the mood to think of Phoebe and her complexities, maybe having something completely different on standby would help me in the long-run? But I do feel terribly disloyal having opened a Google Notebook on two other projects today, even if they've both been doing laps of my skull for over a year.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Have you tried mind mapping to work things through? I find it really helps me to focus :-)

Lazy Perfectionista said...

That's what I started doing last night! Spooky...

 
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