June Writing Update

It’s been a while since my last writing update, so I will now write one. Ha-ha. Get it? Write a writing update? So funny I am.

Let’s see. Where was I? Hold on a moment while I read my last post from March.

Oh yes, I was writing 50-100 word summaries of each scene that would be in Sovereignty. That did happen, sort of, but I never actually finished an outline that I felt comfortable with. There are still holes in the plot that I can’t fill in. Still, I wrote about 1,000 words of a new first chapter. Unfortunately I was not happy with it. I just can’t find a “hook” for that story. It remains tantalizingly out of reach.

In all that time of not re-writing through April, May, and June, I had plenty of time to pursue some other ideas and write something brand new.

But of course I didn’t do that. I’ve been a gigantic heaping pile of failure as a writer.

My self-confidence for storytelling is entirely gone right now. I feel like that’s something they never tell you in writing seminars and workshops and how-to books: Writing a made-up story is terrifying. There are so many things that can go wrong, not the least of which is that people won’t like it. Or even worse, you won’t like it. Those are very real, if not 100% certain, possibilities. It takes a lot of determination to push through that barrier.

And that’s not all. They tell you to write every day to get better. But I’m beginning to understand more about why you should write every day, and it’s not necessarily about improving. It gets harder and harder to start writing as more days pass without writing. After a certain amount of time, it’s nearly impossible to start up again. For me that time limit seems to be about three weeks to a month. Soon after, the illusory bubble that I can be a successful author of novels completely pops.

Maybe I’m not cut out for writing fiction at all. Maybe I should try writing non-fiction. I had an amusing idea for a non-fiction book: Advice For Those New To The Internet. In it, I would write things that genuine newbies would find helpful, while simultaneously entertaining people who are Internet veterans.

Another book could be: Advice For People Who Are Scared Of Computers. I could sub-title it: A guide to surviving the robot apocalypse. And being non-fiction, it has the advantage of only having to be about 20,000 words. Oh, bugger. Of course someone has already written one.

Those are not very good ideas.

So I’m back at square one. I might as well have never written anything before. (Wow that’s a hard sentence, and I’m still not sure about it.)

So here’s what I’m going to do. Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in July. I think I might jump into that one and write something brand new. Because I’m at rock bottom right now and I need a creative spark.