Writers are not endless creative wells.
And I think it can be hard for some of us to hear or discover that. Sometimes when you write and write and write, then edit and edit and edit … the well just run dries. It becomes harder to gather the motivation to put words on the pages, and even when you do get a few out, they’re painful and ugly.
You tell yourself it’s just a bad few days. Except a few days turn into a week, then another, and it’s still terribly difficult. Your plot is going nowhere, your dialogues drag, and you’re not even having fun anymore.
I had that problem starting Isandor3. My original outline had to be trashed, and unlike with many other novels where I dump one outline because I have a better idea, this time I had no plans. No plan, and no inspiration to make up for it.
It was hard. After a summer of intense writing, to be so unable to get anything good on paper? When I no longer had my Masters or a job to distract me? Yikes. For a while I did what I always do: pushed through. It made things worse, and I had to stop and let everything shimmer for a while before I could start slowly putting words in the novel again. Not great words, but words still.
The end result was that instead of finishing the draft by October 31, as originally planned, I did so late in November, riding the NaNoWriMo wave to get as many scenes crudely drafted as I could. The novel is still a wreck, but at least I’ll know where this trilogy ends as I pick up revisions on the first.
And right now? The very idea of writing is tiring to me. I’m burned out. I gave what I had left to finish NaNoWriMo, and I’m (mostly) taking the rest of the year off. I need more than a few days of break. I need to fill that well again, reading awesome books and playing awesome video games.
I’m sure once I sit back to write in 2016, the words will flow again, as they always have before. But for now, it feels ridiculously good not to be writing, and that’s okay, too.