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- May 20, 2008
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"Occasionally a date with a face blank as a sheet of paper asks you whether writers often become discouraged. Say that sometimes they do and sometimes they do. Say it's a lot like having polio."
--Lorrie Moore, "How to Be a Writer"
My original thread title was more clever and had zombies in it. But they're gone now.
Anyway, I'm at this point where my brain is rotten but I feel this drive to keep on writing even though I know I'm not doing any good. That sounds like pure self-deprecation and ordinarily I'd say to persist and see what comes out of it, but this is fatigued, depressed rot, and my depressed internal monologue refuses to be satisfied with anything I write anyway.
There are many causes for feeling like this and one of them is that frustration I'm sure we all get periodically that all of our hard work has only gotten us wherever we are.
So, I'm in the trenches right now, but I want to keep fighting. I don't know how to write through this. I've been trying to use it and write stories whose tone is informed by my own whatever. I've been doing writerly things like retyping favorite chapters of novels by other people, rereading things I like and figuring out why I like certain parts.
But something is still holding me back, which would be ok if I knew better how to leverage that so I could write through it.
What do you do?
--Lorrie Moore, "How to Be a Writer"
My original thread title was more clever and had zombies in it. But they're gone now.
Anyway, I'm at this point where my brain is rotten but I feel this drive to keep on writing even though I know I'm not doing any good. That sounds like pure self-deprecation and ordinarily I'd say to persist and see what comes out of it, but this is fatigued, depressed rot, and my depressed internal monologue refuses to be satisfied with anything I write anyway.
There are many causes for feeling like this and one of them is that frustration I'm sure we all get periodically that all of our hard work has only gotten us wherever we are.
So, I'm in the trenches right now, but I want to keep fighting. I don't know how to write through this. I've been trying to use it and write stories whose tone is informed by my own whatever. I've been doing writerly things like retyping favorite chapters of novels by other people, rereading things I like and figuring out why I like certain parts.
But something is still holding me back, which would be ok if I knew better how to leverage that so I could write through it.
What do you do?