Complaint: Damn You, Writer's Block!

The joy and delight of "walking without a tightrope" in writing has, inevitably, landed me flat on my ass. Fortunately, the ground is soft. But still.

Come to think of it, it's actually not writer's block; more like writer's anomie. I've written myself into a wall, or a corner, or maybe more of a traffic jam, really. There are lots of characters but I'm not sure how they all fit together. I'm wondering if I should print out and read what I wrote, just to see if it makes any sense. Last year, I didn't.

But if I do print it all out, then I fear I will see how crappy the current novel-in-progress is, and that will be discouraging. And that's definitely not the point of NaNoWriMo. So I want to keep going without getting too caught up in the whole quality issue.

It's just that I'm getting kind of, I don't know, bored, of some of my characters. And if I'm bored with them, so too will anyone else brave enough to read them should any of this ever see the light of day, which is still in question.

Maybe I have too many characters. Maybe I have to figure out what's going to happen. I have a strong background in improvisation, so the idea of planning out the story doesn't totally appeal to me. And yet, when I've written other things, there has been some sort of outline or sequence, at least implied, if not stated.

So maybe I need to think a bit more about what's happening in the story, and take my monologues from there. It's just getting so damn complicated. And messy. And confusing.

Kind of like life.