You know when you’ve hit a writing roll. You just can’t stop writing. You’re so excited about how the story is going. You’re up till two in the morning, and the computer keys are hot. You know you should go to sleep, but you just can’t pull yourself away. You’re immersed in your imaginary world having so much fun.
Then somewhere in the next few days, you can barely bring yourself to the computer to continue writing. You just have no energy for writing. You’d rather be doing literally anything else. It’s not that you have writer’s block. You know where you want this story to go, but you don’t want to put the effort into getting there.
What happened?
I love a good writing roll. It makes my heart happy when I can write a whole short story in a month without having to tell myself to write.
We writers know that isn’t the norm though as much as we wish it was.
For me, this usually happens during the middle of a story. I’m just bored with the idea. I shove it aside and will probably never go back to it. If I do, I will try to restart the entire thing.
Sometimes I just get distracted with other creative activities. I will have the desire to do nothing else but knit hats for the next three months. Once I get bored of that, I either go to a different creative thing or back to writing.
The one of the solutions I’ve found is if I genuinely think I’ve got a good story in mind. I’ll make myself work through the murky middle once I’m back on my writing roll. If I don’t think it’s a good story when I come back to it or just really don’t care, it goes into the ever growing pile of unfinished novels.
Sometimes I ruin my writing roll by thinking I don’t need a plot for my story and that I can just figure it out as I go.
Bad plan.
I have learned the hard way that my stories will end up stranger than “Alice in Wonderland” if I don’t have some idea of where I want to take the story. I will tie my characters in tangled knots and have no clue how to get them out. Now my entire story looks like “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” on steroids.
Another thing which somewhat helps me get through is having someone reading your story who is interested in it. They are interested in it. It gives me more confidence and motivation to continue with the story. It doesn’t always work, but a majority of the time it does.
Maybe the solution for me is to only write short stories with simple plots. That way I don’t have to constantly go back and triple check for contradictions which will save me some work in the next draft.
If you have solutions for keeping the writing roll going, please leave them in comments below. I would love to hear them!
Natters Matters 