Writer’s Block
Okay, so I’ve got writer’s block.
It’s not a crime. It’s more like a disease. An insidious, creeping disease that steals my creativity and locks me away in a horrible nightmare of sad, soggy prose. My problem isn’t that I don’t have ideas galore for stories. And, it’s not that they aren’t original and interesting. The problem is, when I go to put them on paper, they sound different than they did in my head. There’s something missing. I have no idea what it could be, because I write basically like I speak. It flows naturally and easily, but when I read it, it sounds flat and dull in my inner ear.
Maybe it’s because I’m trying to write fantasy stories in a world that I haven’t fleshed out enough. Maybe I’m not seeing my characters and world clearly enough. I’ll be damned if I know. If I did, I would be writing fiction right now, not this blog. In fact, I started making entries here in the hopes that it would get my creative muse flowing and let me get back to the stories. So far, that hasn’t really worked out, but hope springs eternal.
While trying to smash my writer’s block, I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading history. Mainly Chinese and Japanese history. Those “Daily Life In…” kind of books. It’s really interesting for me, a Westerner, to see how advanced those ancient civilizations really were. Ancient China was far, far more advanced in many ways than Europe during the same time period. Sometimes, I sit and try to puzzle out just what happened and how we, the West, got the technological edge over Asia. It’s a strange, convoluted thing. And, ripe with story ideas.
The other subject I’ve been reading is writing. That is, I’ve just finished re-reading Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science-Fiction and Fantasy. In fact, I’ll probably do an entry tomorrow about the MICE “rule”. It’s fairly usefull for speculative fiction authors. It helps keep persepctive.
And, finally, I’ve been reading fiction in between the non-fiction. Mainly, I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Ethshar series. They’re really nice books that deal with normal, everyday problems in a fantastic setting, but they don’t get too nasty. I mean, they’re realistic, but I wouldn’t hesitate to reccomend them to my 10-year-old daughter.
So, until the next time, keep writing!
