Monday Ramblings: Finding Inspiration in Echo Park
I’d like to say it was a desire to live to be 100 that drove me to spend more time in the garden, but really it was a nasty case of writer’s block.
After gleefully telling the world I’ve finally entered the drafting stage of my book on the Feliz Curse, I got exactly 3,225 words into the prologue, when the real curse — the dreaded Blank Page Syndrome — suddenly struck.
There’s nothing more common (or more insidious) for a writer than those painful periods when the muses fall silent. Go to any writer’s blog, chat group or forum, and you’ll find us idling for hours on the topic as we commiserate and offer each other tips for restarting our engines, all the while ironically avoiding doing just that.
My surefire solution has always been to force myself to jot a single phrase — any phrase, no matter how nonsensical. Most writers find that once they put something down on paper, they can’t stop tinkering with it, and soon one sentence sparks a second, then a third, and so on. (We’re fairly compulsive that way.)
This time the strategy failed. Hitting a difficult transition in the chapter, I just found myself editing and re-editing the same few pages I’d already spewed out and feeling about as productive as a hamster on a wheel… Read more
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