A Spiraling Trap

So, I find myself deep within the spiraling trap of the story-restarting loop. And it's all because I haven't been able to write every day. Or at least that's what I tell myself to help me feel better.

You see, I tend to keep all the bits of my story in my head as I write. I'm not really one for an outline-- I prefer to let the story unfold before me. I do like to have a bit of a skeleton idea of major plot and theme points, but I let it flesh itself out on all the in between stuff. It makes for some pretty messy drafts, but some pretty exciting writing sessions.

My current story hit a pretty hefty roadblock about 20,000 words in, and while I could have probably put my head down and barreled through it, I was in a pretty vulnerable place in my life and I chose to just let it sit instead. Bad decision. All of the pieces of the story I'd been holding in my head disappeared before I got back to it.

So, I moved onto a different project instead, thinking I just needed a fresh start. But I'm not ready for that project-- not yet. So I went back to my first one. Of course, I'd lost so many of my original ideas that were floating in my head, and I'd considered so many new ones, that I just went ahead and started over from the beginning. I figured there was no harm-- after all, I'd be rewriting it all anyway to work in the nifty new stuff I'd thought of.

Of course, that was like three restarts ago. Yeah, it's a trap. One that keeps repeating itself. 7000 words into a new draft, and it's such a disaster that I feel like I have to start over just to keep my sanity. Each time I say that I'm going to keep at it every day so I don't lose all those precious mental pieces, but it keeps falling apart. Maybe I just need to spend an hour or more everyday just writing down those ideas, in a cohesive and interesting form-- that's what they call writing a story, right? Or at least the starting point for one.

Here's what I keep telling myself, as I heard from a panel at the Life, Universe and Everything conference a few months ago. "Give yourself permission to write crap. You can fix crap; you can't fix a blank page." -Julie Wright