My ramblings

The bane of my existence

Let's talk about the most wonderful thing for any author ever. Writer's block! And right off the bat I will admit that this rant itself is just one more thing to distract me from doing anything productive, but let's not think about that. And if you want the short version, just see the linked video, it pretty much conveys the same message I'm trying to convey.

Before I began writing I thought that writer's block was just another word for, running out of creativity. That someone had ran out of ideas and was frustrated by not knowing where to continue their story. Or maybe it was some sort of fear or losing the will to write. Oh, such simpler times past me had, because for me it's nothing like that at all.

My writer's block works much the same way I handled a lot of school assignments. Postpone it until the last moment. It's not that I want to panic throughout a weekend on 5 cups of coffee trying to write a long scientific article about the effects of road noise which is due on Tuesday. It's not that I'm incapable of writing the text, or that I'm lacking in material to write. I just can't, not until the panic of a deadline starts looming and pushes me to do it.

Unfortunately, writing stories and fanfics are a different matter. There are no deadlines that push me to write, only the slowly building anxiety over letting all my readers down because I can't sit down and write. Instead I think about writing while never doing it.

It's not a lack of creativity, almost the contrary. Like "A Villain's Revolution" where I know exactly where I want to go with the story and the major plot points I really want. But then I start thinking and come up with three new paths that will lead to the same end point, but in different ways. All of them great, but I can only go with one, and it will close of the other paths. Which leads to me laying in bed thinking through all of them endlessly considering which one I want to go with. And that's not talking about the 4 or 5 or so fanfic concepts that I have half finished in my head, or the 3 original book concepts I also want to write. It's so much that it becomes difficult to go down one path.

And writer's block definitely isn't the same as a writing block, because I have written a lot. But it takes so long to get it going. I have written entire chapters multiple times just to delete it all because I thought of something better. Or decided to go down another path. Or simply didn't like it. Or simply because so long had passed that I didn't know where I was and then might as well start anew.

Then there are the distractions. You know, anything that I can interact with. I look to my right and see the guitar, that's 30 minutes gone. I wake up and decide to just play some games for an hour so after breakfast, suddenly it's time for dinner. I sit down to write but then see that one of my favourite youtubers has uploaded a new video, I have to see it, and while I'm at it might as well browse reddit for 2 hours, then look through space twitter, and there is a nice picture of the Mir-space station let me look through its' Wikipedia page, which goes to the shuttle wiki, which goes to the apollo wiki, which goes to the appolo-soyuz wiki, which goes to the entire list of R-7 rockets and at some point I end up watching a 40 minute video about various docking systems that have been used in space. Wait, what's the time? Oh right, 1 hour past midnight might as well go to sleep and wake up ready to write tomorrow. (Spoilers, that doesn't happen)

As I said, Writer's block is the bane of my existence and I don't know how to fix it. I have thought about setting deadlines, but I don't know how I would enforce them on myself. At least in school there was a threat behind the deadlines. How do you do that outside of that? It is not fun and I'm getting really tired of it. Outside of that life is good. I've got a job, I've gotten to vote for the first time (election night next Monday now, it looks good), and I'm having a mostly positive outlook on life. So life's good, but writer's block is a bitch.