No new words to report today.
I took a step back today and after some encouragement from friends online I realized the fear and anxiety I was experiencing was completely self inflicted. So despite the lack of word count I’m feeling more confident as the story concept I want to write slowly percolates.
I happened to be reading Rob Parnell’s Fast & Furious 2: Writing For Amazon and Kindle last night and he had some interesting and helpful things to say about the fear/anxiety/creativity connection. Despite their hyped-up titles, I’ve found Parnell’s books to be helpful and informative. I’ll do a longer post about my own issues concerning the anxiety/creativity connection in a later post.
I also came to the realization that while taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo I fully expected to go from zero to sixty (or 50K in this instance) without any real plan or training.
I NEED to practice.
Writing creatively is like working any muscle and I figuratively need to learn to walk before I can run. I’m going to start doing ‘morning pages’, a sort-of wake-up ritual than many people swear by, but I always thought was a little silly. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to sit at my desk with a pad and pen and write something, anything, first thing in the morning. It will be good practice and accomplishing a creative task (no matter how small) will hopefully set the tone for the entire day.