Sometimes I, like the rest of us, suffer from writer’s block…
This is not one of those times.
I still have ideas. I can still whip up a workable (if not lovable) outline for my WIPs. And my recent word counts (I’m told) are enviable, at 2000-4000 words per day.
Yet things feel “blah.”
This isn’t “writer’s block,” this is “writer’s slog.”
writer’s slog (n): a temporary state of being perfectly capable of writing but feeling terribly out of love with it
With three WIPs currently ticking along toward their endings, I find myself having to constantly swap back and forth between them just to keep myself interested.
In the “con” column, this means that I will not have any of the three done for a good while. In the “pro” column, it means I will, at some point, have three completed drafts in quick succession. That’s gratifying! But what about the meantime? Why isn’t this fun right now?
If you were hoping for something profound, then here is where I will awkwardly back out of the room…
Yet I think the lack of profundity is the point, because I’m not sure “writer’s slog” calls for anything profound.
I think it takes some pretty small things to fall back in love with writing.
For myself, it meant buying and customizing a mechanical keyboard, then taking typing tests over and over each morning until I’m just super horny for the act of hitting these keys!
Also, I bought a plant.
And that pretty much did it. That got me over my hump and I think these bandaids can see me through another few weeks and another few tens of thousands of words.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
