Attended the Get Writing 2012 conference in Hatfield last Saturday. Came away really quite desperate to get down to work, but was still struggling with finding a way in to the book I've been wanting to write. I spoke to so many people with works in progress or books they wanted to pitch to agents and I felt like an absolute fraud having nothing to show for my months of tinkering.
Spent Thursday - a day I had put aside for writing - looking at a blank screen and getting more and more depressed. The only things I have produced since I packed in the OU course because I just wanted to 'get on with it' are two very short stories. Well received by my Writers' Workshop colleagues, but still ...
I did a bit of writing around the subject yesterday during my very short lunch break. I thought if I could identify who my main character was, what she wanted, what she needed and who was in conflict with those wants and needs, then I might be able to move a bit. Until this point, I knew the elements of the story, but couldn't decide the best point of view or, whose story to tell, how to tell it, when to set it and what genre it would be. It had been everything from historical fiction to thriller!
I'm pleased to report that the sideways approach seems to have worked. I've now got 600 words down, which may not sound like much, but believe me, after the tumbleweed that's been blowing through my brain recently, they feel like the most miraculous 600 words in the English language!
There's still part of me that's convinced I'm not up to the challenge and won't have the staying power, imagination or talent to conjure up another 80,000 - 100,000 words that will be able to hold a reader's attention and therefore worthy of publishing, but if I don't give it a go, then I'll never know. And I know I'll regret that.
And if I'm not writing, then I'm not a writer.
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