on restarting writing

Maybe it is the new year, or a lack of the usual more urgent pressures on my time, but I feel resolved to make more of an effort with my creative writing.

In the past I have always felt that I ought to be doing more creative writing, but have struggled to get round to doing anything constructive about it. Well I did write a couple of unpublished novels in the eighties, and there is the material on my blog/website and even the Amazon reviews, but it feels like a long time since I have been writing seriously.

Anyway, I have moved up creative writing to closer to the forefront of my noggin, and I am allocating more of my creative and practical thinking to it. Material evidence is probably thin on the ground, but I wrote the story Misericord a few weeks ago, I did some work on a draft cover and graphics, scans of the brochure for an Anchor Blocks leaflet that I own, and some cursory research on on-line publishing. I have also started to trawl through the half finished stuff that is lying about on the my drive, although it falls short of the work of Samuel Johnston, there is some stuff there that is, with a push, useable. There might also be some material sitting in my blogging and reviewing.

I am resigned not to being too precious about things, earlier drafts are not works of staggering genius, so I will feel free to butcher and rearrange.

Something that has had a surprising impact has been doing some work on a draft cover. Now that I have a draft cover, and draft title, it is easier to envisage what the eventual publication will look like. And now that I know what it will look like, it is easier to envisage what would fit into it, and what would not.

Another decision that has helped break the logjam, is my decision now to focus on writing a collection of short stories. I have been working on an idea for a novel, well it is an idea, and I am sure that it is good enough for a novel.

But, although I can write material for it, I really still have no idea how it will work as a novel. Just writing stuff, and hoping that it will take form, as it goes along, is resolutely not working for me at the moment. Maybe, for me, there is just not a novel in the idea for the moment. Anyway, it has gone to one side, and my focus is on my book of short stories.

Currently sitting at around ten thousand words, but they all need a bit of an edit and tidy up, and eight thousand need a lot of an edit and tidy up. Not sure how big a book of short stories ought to be. It might be as much as I can write in a year or two, or until I get bored, or it might find a natural length.

Another thing that seems to have helped break the logjam is telling people what I am doing. That way it is okay to just zone out and do some writing, or editing, without having to be evasive about what I am doing.

Another thing that seems to have helped break the logjam is making sure that I am not always so busy, that any time left over, when I am not working, I am so zonked out, that I am in no position to do anything constructive. It might be old age creeping up on me, but a long week is exhausting, and without taking breaks it does all get to be a bit of a hamster wheel.