From the mouths of muggles

[cimorene]

... I was going to say 'non-writers', but I don't know, maybe my therapist actually is a writer. He thinks I should try to tackle my writer's block - brought it up, even, when I wasn't talking about writing but about the creative stuff I wanted to find time for this summer (painting and sewing kinda stuff from a short to-do list).

He explained the concept of freewriting to me, and it was surreal to have it defined by someone who didn't presume you'd already know about it. To me it's foremost a weird hobby I shared with friends at age 12-14ish, writing and typing outlandishly pointless stream of consciousness things (but trying to make them funny), and then swapping between classes and writing comments on each others'. And I've done it when feeling emo as a young adult, too. I never considered it a writing exercise those times, because they were well before writer's block. Of course I haven't done anything like it for a very long time, but the lingering familiarity lends the whole idea of using it in this novel way — for writer's block — a piquant alienation.

(The following were tweeted and have been moved here:)

I tried 20 minutes of freewriting, but I didn't manage to write everything that crossed my mind because I was worrying at the logistics of
That One Novel that I haven't managed to write for the past mumble years I've had the idea.

This is really the only idea TO worry at when it comes to thinking about Writer's Block, even though it's really less than half of one.

Because it's been like YEARS since I could feel any enthusiasm about writing anything fannish.

I can't believe I wrote like 100 50 thousand words of a *secondary pairing* in bandom. Geez.

Though I do get excited about Yuletide, but it's also quite different with a rare fandom — and Yuletide is almost the only stuff I've written since bandom, except four years ago when I filled a few kinkmeme prompts.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, these massive slumps are so weird. I'm with you. I'm trying to worm my way out of one and it's a very weird experience compared to the years when I wrote every day and the stories just poured out.

[cimorene]

Yes! That brief period of filling kinkmeme prompts did work, sort of - I finished four things, and one of them was 10k! - but it STILL didn't work in the sense of defeating the block, because it never stopped being weird and effortful, and the extra self-examination or... ennui?... never went away, either. And after finishing them, I still got stuck a few thousand words into a prompt and stopped writing until the next Yuletide, anyway.

[spark]

I'm just taking this opportunity to say that I still love your Tomb Raider trilogy insanely much. I think I'll go read it again now.

[cimorene]

See, I can't believe how much I wrote back then. A friend was like, "I like this pairing" and I was like "Hey, I could write that" after watching both movies in a weekend so I just... did. I never do that anymore. I mean, I still have those "We both like this" conversations, and I still get those type of ideas, but now I just think of it like someone should (or could) write that, and move on. But it's nice people are still enjoying my writing, even if mostly I'm not doing it anymore...

[lobelia321]

Oh I hope you get your writing groove back. Thinking of you in your struggles!