Tag: thewritinglife

It’s happening again. My mind feels like a maze, and I’m running from idea to idea, bouncing off the walls inside my head. I stare into space for hours, thinking about nothing. I check my social media accounts manically, in between games of Candy Crush Saga. “Bing, bing bing! Richochet Rabbit!” That is my brain. There are about a hundred tabs open on my iPad. One of them is my book. This creation that was trapped in my head for about 20 years, suddenly released from prison a year ago. It came out as memoir, then fiction took over. It was entirely out of my control. It flowed from brain to fingers then became 10,000 word group of essays. Each told a story. “You need a plot for this to be a book, with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” a wise writing friend told me. “But I’m a pantser” I said, “Writing by the seat of my pants, that’s a thing.” I had read this, which flooded me with relief at the time. I thought my career as a writer was done for. Not organized, no story line. Finished. And it was not over, however, one can only fly by the seat of ones pants for so long. I knew this, just needed to hear it. So, I went back to school, pushed through the online course I had enrolled in from the Success Publishing Academy. Shout out to Alexa Haddock Bigwarfe from Women in Publishing and founder of the WritePublishSell web page- I highly recommend it!) Back to learning the basics. From that, I learned how to brainstorm an outline, which every book must have eventually, if not in the beginning. Voila, the plot became clear. With that, a key chapter that I had stopped writing at one point as I did not know where it was going beyond into a dark woods, became a real turning point in the story. Woot! Yay me. I typed furiously. I could even picture the cover of the book, based on this chapter. I sketched it and shared with an artist friend of mine. I was firing on all cylinders! I still write some stuff with pen and paper, and I tend to take notes while I am typing . Anything that pops into my head randomly, goes in a small notebook. Then, bang, that proverbial brick wall stopped me completely. There I sat with 100 tabs open, and a pile of note paper covered with gibberish. Work got busy, the garden needed planting, I had a cocktail on the deck at sunset (unlike the stereotype, I cannot write after I drink alcohol.) On and on. So I searched online “How to conquer writer’s block” Hey it works. I once Googled “How to find a lost parrot” and it worked. But that is another story! I digress. One suggestion was “Write about writer’s block” And, it’s working, because, well, here I am, I just wrote this blog. So, cheers my writing friends! I am going to hop on over to the tab that is my book and get back on track now. I hope maybe this helps someone else refocus, hope this reaches you as you bounce from tab to tab, on the brink of despair! Do not give up! As my high school writing teacher wrote in my yearbook: “Keep Writing!” Thanks Mr. Merrigan!