Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Is it Writer's Block if You're Still Writing?

I've hit one of those points with "The Opening" where everything has slowed right down but hasn't yet stopped. I'm hoping I can break through without it ever stopping because until yesterday evening everything was going fine.

The issue is with one particular scene which wasn't in the original outline, but which it became apparent I needed it. Unfortunately in the words of William Blake it's a case of “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” By which I mean, yes, now there's rather too much information in that scene - and a good chunk of it is world relevant but not really story relevant. Would that be accidental worldbuilding? That would be kind of appropriate given the subject of yesterday's blog.

Logically I know I can revamp the scene correctly in the rewrite but my brain is saying "What the heck is this and why have we written it?" Well mostly it sort of just happened. I guess this was stuff about the story world which my brain needed to get out on paper for future reference. Best of all the stuff that I got down so unexpectedly gels perfectly with what I already knew about this particular world, which shows how coherent it is in my mind. I'm happy about that. Now I just need to make it plausible to other people, because it does tend towards the weird.

Anyway as a result of this - um - writer's bottleneck (it's not a block it's a temporary constriction of flow) I didn't reach 5,000 words yesterday and I'm still lagging behind today. But I will persevere and finish this by the weekend. Even if it kills me (metaphorically speaking anyway).