It's been nearly 2 months since I finished the rough draft of "Future Tense," and since then I've not been in my usual writing mode. For most of the past 5 1/2 years, I've been working non-stop on one novel or another, either writing 1K/day or editing.
I can look at the past 2 months and label it 'writer's block' and start to spiral into panic mode, or I can look at this fallow time quite differently.
As a dear friend of mine says, you can't keep harvesting the tree without feeding the roots. I was guilty of not taking care of myself. Between maintaining a breakneck writing pace, coming home from an overseas trip to find my living room ceiling leaking and the months of destruction/construction that followed, having to help move my elderly parents into assisted living, and having an emergency appendectomy (yikes!), I had depleted my stores.
The last thing I needed was to beat myself up for not writing. Instead, I have been playing with some journalling/free writing exercises and poetry over the past few months. Every few days, I would think about one of my many novel ideas, but nothing called to me. I didn't force the issue.
On the plane, after a terrific holiday with my family in Montana, I started to do some character exploration for a proposed sequel to "The Between." I'm still not ready to dive in and do the kind of preparation this novel will take, but when it's time, I know I can do it.
I'm filling the well again and that feels good.
No comments:
Post a Comment