After the War (102)I'm writing a novel, the first draft of which can be found elsewhere on the site. Over here you'll find my thoughts about writing.
I seem to be writing again. I haven't written a lot, lately. From what I hear, this is something that happens to a lot of non-professional writers. (And not just to the non-professional or the non-famous.)
I don't really think I have, or had, writers block - it's more that I was busy doing other stuff and I couldn't seem to care enough to sit down and write. Which may or may not amount to the same thing as writer's block. (I don't think it does. I've had writer's block - which to me is the sensation that you get when you need to get some piece finished and you have to strain so hard to get the damned words out that you feel that, any minute now, your brain will start dribbling out of your ears. In terms of sheer awfulness this wasn't anywhere near that. But I digress.)
It seems to me that, for most non-professional writers anyway, not writing for prolonged periods of time is going to be a fact of life. There are lots of valid reasons for not writing, one of these being that, since the chances of ever getting paid for your prose are fairly slim, at this stage you're mostly writing for your own enjoyment and when you're not enjoying it you may want to consider not doing it. On the other hand, not writing for a while doesn't automatically mean that writing is not for you and you might as well give it up altogether. As long as you're alive, reasonably sound of mind and able to wield a pen or a word processor, there's always another chance.
(One other thing: I'm now putting that 'draw what you see, not what you know' thing into practice that I wrote about in the previous entry, more than a year ago. I've bought a sketch book and I'm making drawings of my hands - drawings that I couldn't possibly do from memory or from what I know about the shapes of hands. Click the 'previous' link at the bottom of this page to see the previous entry.)
This article was written after writing episode 102 of the first draft of my novel After the War.
After the War (102)
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