Update on the Lack of Writing

Since it’s now March I should probably write an update. I am still struggling with writing, and failing miserably. This is the result of many factors which are incredibly easy to identify, but not very easy to resolve.

The first is NaNoWriMo. I’m wondering if I should skip it in the future, because the blitz of writing during that one month has always been followed by a period of severe burn-out which is hard to recover from. As it is now three months later, that’s probably the least of my problems.

The second is that I’ve been moving a lot of stuff from one house to another over the past month, which has eaten into my time and energy. This is a pretty flimsy excuse, because really, even with only a half-hour a day, you can write something.

The third is a more weirder thing and the most hardest to deal with, and it’s a direct result of the marathon of Wheel of Time audiobooks I listened to. See, I live alone now, so the house is usually dead quiet. But while I was listening to those audiobooks for weeks on end, I got used to hearing voices all the time, and when I finished, I discovered (or re-discovered, because this has happened before) that the quiet of the house is extremely unsettling, especially after dark. So now, to stave off the willies, almost as soon as I get home I turn on something with voices, be it an audiobook, podcast, Netflix, or YouTube. I’m not sure if it’s fear of silence or fear of being alone or some combination thereof.

Unfortunately it impacts my writing because it’s basically impossible for me to concentrate whenever I can hear people speaking, particularly if they are narrating or acting in a story. My brain seems to zero in on the voices and process them automatically no matter what else I’m trying to do at the same time. It’s the same with singing. I can’t write while listening to any kind of songs with vocals, or podcasts. I always have to put on instrumental music or nothing.

So… there’s that. Periodically I try to turn everything off and return to writing, but so far I haven’t gotten more than a hundred words down before giving up in disgust. And somehow it feels worse to only write a few words than it does to write nothing.