Just Keep Writing.

I feel bad. I haven’t been posting here like I should be, and I’m worried since I’ve been having trouble writing and lying to myself about it. When I try to write, nothing comes to mind. I keep rotating between a few different attempts to inspire myself, but everything else falls flat too. I keep getting stuck on one particular scene, so I figure what I need to do is try writing it in different ways. I’ve tried writing it in third person, second person, first person. I’ve tried starting in the middle of dialogue or a scene, I’ve tried by having my main character talk about her backstory a little, or at the beginning of her day from the moment she wakes up.

I’ve also tried writing a few scenes ahead and seeing if it gives me any ideas for how to write the scene, but those get me stuck too. I’ve even considered to switching to another story idea that I’ve been developing for a lot longer and even wrote out before and seeing what I can do to make it longer, but then I run into another problem that I’ve been having with this one, too.

I know where I want everything to start and how I want it to end, but I’m having trouble thinking of what obstacles I want my characters to face in between. I need to find a way to make it longer, essentially. I mentioned somewhere before that I wrote something before which ended up being about 7 “parts” long, and through google I’ve found that on average a paperback novel has about 250-300 words on each page and that a 50k word novel would be about 170-ish pages in Word or Google Docs. It makes me feel a little better though, since I was expecting something way crazier.

The final problem is that I’m afraid it won’t be good, even though I chose specifically to write a first draft so it didn’t have to be good. I just can’t get it through to myself that it won’t even have the chance to be good if I don’t write it at all, and since I’ve made a commitment through this project I have to at least try. Everything else I’ve tried to make a commitment to has failed, and I just keep putting this off because I’m afraid that it’ll fail too, even though that’s a 100% guarantee that it will.

I’m actually really glad these blog posts are part of the project, since it really helped me think through some of the problems I’ve been having. I even have some ideas for how to get through that scene, and generally when I can find that “flow” I have almost no problem writing afterwards. Even in n writing the last sentence in the previous paragraph I feel a lot better, since all I could think of in the back of my mind is a little blue fish giving me the best advice anyone could: just keep writing.

I hope this isn’t confusing or anything, I just kind of wrote what I thought as I thought it with little editing or revision.