Dear Diary,
It's me again! As you may have heard from the pages of my other (countless) notebooks, I got it into my head that this was the summer that I was going to write a novel. Having never written a novel before, the whole process seems terribly daunting. So far I have a basic outline of the plot, and several in depth character sketches. I started writing a couple days ago, and it's going ok, but I find that I can't write for long periods of time. Maybe it's my inner editor kicking in, telling me everything has to be perfect the first time around. I know I shouldn't expect perfection, but it's hard for me to loosen up and just write. What should I do? But then again, why am I asking you this question? You're just a dumb diary :)
Laura
There you have it folks. This teenage writer is attempting a novel. Not that I haven't tried before. I've thought about taking part in NaNoWriMo, but school work pretty much takes over my life in the fall. Summer is the only time I get any real writing done. If you'd like to keep tabs on my progress, look for the picture of the typewriter on the left.
Oh! And before I forget, let me bring your attention momentarily to the new page features. (Yay! Are you excited? 'Cause I am.) To your left you will see a place where you can follow me, a box that tells the (rather discouraging) word count of my novel-in-progress, and finally a list of blogs that I found interesting, and hope you will too. Now, if you look to your right, you will see the Daily Photo Prompt, my profile, categories, and archives. And up at the top is a quote that I thought was pretty cool.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about my writing struggles, but I'd also like to hear about yours. What work-in-progress is giving you the most trouble right now? And how do you overcome the hopeless desire for perfection?
I love the novel progress under the typewriter and the daily photo prompt!
ReplyDeleteI'm not working on anything really as of now, but I have been feeling like writing a story or making art. I feel super inspired. But yesterday, as soon as I started I stopped, because I think I expected too much. So today I shall try again! And this time I'll try to finish it. :D I've just been browsing art a lot and I haven't been making much art, so that's why my expectations were so high. I kind of started off imagining that it would just turn out great within the first few minutes.
As for the perfection thing, I don't really know. With writing, I don't take it that seriously usually, and then once I start liking what I have, I begin to edit it more and stuff. Even then, I try to restrain myself from changing the stuff I've already written because I feel like keeping the fresh spontaneity of it, I guess? I like that feeling you get when you read what you have until you get to the part where you stopped, and then you keep reading as if it continued. It seems to be easier to trail off into the open when I have the fresh unedited stuff still there. What I picture for this is like when you watch cartoons, and one character is being chased by another. (ex. peter pan, looney tunes) And one of them(peter/roadrunner) runs and runs until they've run off the cliff or ship mast. The other character(captain hook/wolf) follows and doesn't realize they are walking on air until they fall. Luckily, peter can fly, and roadrunner runs so fast that it was able to get to the next cliff before gravity took action. So yeah, when I'm reading my writing, I'm running along the cliff, and then when the cliff stops, I keep running as if its still there. Most of the time I fall though, because I get there and it feels like I can almost say the next line, but nothing comes to me and I've stalled and gravity then pulls me down. But sometimes it works!
Hope that helped somewhat. It was more of a sidetracked analogy than an answer, but oh well! It was fun to write :D