Pity-Partying Tango

Writing Update.
Is this the part where I tell you that I want to quit writing?
The part where I tell you that I have no freakin' idea what I'm doing with this novel.
And I really, really want to give up on it. I mean REALLY!
Light the manuscript on fire and let the whole thing go up in smoke.
Yep, that's how I'm feeling about it these days. I know this feeling will pass but until that feeling passes I wait.
I want to move onto a new project. Perhaps go back to my first love, poetry.
Throw some snow on the wall and see what sticks.
Go back to playwriting and write 110 pages of a full-length play.
Do almost anything else but deal with the vast blankness that I have pertaining to this novel.
The writing muse is gone...or at least in a deep sleep...or a coma....or on vacation.
I try to fake it for awhile but there is just so much faking I can do before I know that the words are not right.  The writing isn't getting better.  The story is floundering.  And so am I.
I read in one of my many books on writing that sometimes if you have shared too much of the story... the creative self will stop writing.  Might that be the case?  Well I can't un-do the sharing.  I can't unpop that cork. Going forward I may hold back and keep my fingers still from writing on my blog about the next project but for right now...I am slowly wallowing in the murky depths of a story that doesn't quite work.  Ergh!  If I were to start over, hack it up, what would be left over?  Perhaps I'm not meant to be a novelist?  Who intentionally signs up to be a writer anyway?
I wrote to an old friend to tell them how writing was my first love. And that in my early twenties I thought myself a force to be reckoned with...I wanted to take the publishing world by storm.
Twenty years later, I'm just working on facing the page and not quitting.
My friend reminds me that I persevere, no matter what...I keep moving forward. I feel stuck tonight.
I spent the better part of my adult life working on Plan B, trying to sort out a career, a relationship (a couple of them), some savings for the future.  Yes, well that didn't work out either.
There is no more Plan B.  Writing is what I have.  It's all I've ever wanted to do.  And as I sit here rubbing my eyebrows off, I have to say tonight, I just wish I was a better writer.
Better at the craft. Better at making it work.  Better at not allowing the funk to get the best of me.
I'm still writing...I spent the better part of the day working on one character.  One small slice of the story.  How do you build them up so that they seem like living breathing characters?  One layer at a time. Ergh!

There have been all these articles lately about how a "writer" must conduct themselves pertaining to their blog in order to build their audience.  They say not to share too much personal information, not to whine, not to complain too much.  Yep, I've done all of these "no-nos" in varying degrees since I've first started this blog back in 2008. And really, it's not bad advice since you always want to put your best self out there.  But for f**k sake this is PART of the writing process too. This unmitigated impatience and pity-partying tango is part of it too. Anyway, that's all I have for tonight. Those articles be damned!

Peace out,
L~


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