Unofficially in any regard, even more so since there is no official rendition, I’ve been trying to take on the challenge of writing every day. I’m not as verbose as some, nor as consistent as I’d like to be.
Also, I cheat. Blog posts? They totally count. I have a series of IFTT recipes coupled with some google doc spreadsheet generators that were slightly modified from the ones here to track my word counts. It’s not perfect – I also have some scripts I wrote to scrape word counts out of Scrivener and add them to the totals – but it does the job.
But lately (the last week or so), the well has been coming up dry when it comes to writing. The increase in blog posts is no coincidence – when every word counts, you put them where you can. First, I’m taking a step back from the novel. While I enjoy working on it, lately its begun to feel more and more forced. I recognize I went too over the top from the start, leaving me nowhere to evolve in the story but to even higher and bigger things. What I’d really like to do right this second is write some short stories, but although the mind is willing, the well keeps coming back empty. Mediocre.
On a somewhat relevant tangent, and making me feel better about my own floundering creative streak lately, I came across this letter today from Robert Heinlein to Theodore Sturgeon – both of whom are well-known science fiction writers. As it turns out, Sturgeon went through his own dry spell and wrote to his friend Heinlein for help. Heinlein responded with a small group of writing prompts. Writing prompts can be great like that – triggering an idea or a train of thought that wouldn’t have been occurred to you otherwise. I suspect this is the real reason that established writers stress you read as much and as widely as you can – the brain filters all of that reading and produces natural writing prompts from you (vs the forced, generated kind that a web page or book might give you). Then again, whatever works, go with it.
Personally, I didn’t find a writing prompt that set me on fire, but I did find one that sent me off to write this blog post. We’ll see what tomorrow brings us.