As you may or not have read in some of my posts, I had been experiencing a very real fear about continuing writing and starting my major project. I knew I needed to dispel the fear in order to move on or I would shut myself down as I have done in the past. Friends had tried to be encouraging but no amount could convince me that it was worth continuing. I couldn't move myself forward. Recently, I was finding myself stuck in that spot again, afraid to go further. I had to do something to figure out what to do and gain some confidence in order to convince myself that it was worth continuing.
I've never been the wait-and-see-how-things-go type of person. I can be mellow enough and go with the flow but when it comes to things that I'm personally involved in I will almost always want to take some kind of action. I try to figure out what my next steps are. I need to do something about it. I guess a pretty lame example would be if I really wanted to go swimming but I found no water in the pool I don't think I'd just find my way back home and forget it. I could fill the pool myself or find another place to swim. I bet I'd find another place fairly quickly and make it happen. So when I realized I had battered myself into an immobile standstill, I knew I had to do something about the fear. I wanted to move forward. I wanted to write.
So what's to do? What action could I take? When I was feeling defeated it's not easy to come up with the next steps. But I knew I wasn't going to leave it as is and hope it changed. I thought the best way to dispel the fear was to get an understanding of what was making me fearful about writing. I knew I had this underlying feeling that I didn’t have enough knowledge about writing. It was undermining my confidence.
AHA! Easy! I could get books (one of my favorite things) about writing. And I did and found the first book to be the very medicine I needed. It addressed the craziness, fear, and insanity that I had been experiencing and clued me in that I wasn't the only one that felt that way. It did, really! I was so happy!
Now I have another book that is more technical but it might be to an extreme. Day one do this, day two do that . It might be a little too regimented so I will pick and choose. I certainly don’t want to restrain any creativity (ha-did I use the word restrain about myself). But it also feels good to have a guide that I can choose to follow whether it’s closely or loosely.
It mentioned some good brainstorming ideas and to how to let them flow. It said to use index cards and keep them handy and write ideas down. Well, that's working, but I think index cards are too small for me. I've used up quite a few for just a few ideas. Maybe I'm going into too much detail but then...oh, I’ll figure out the index card problem, I promise. It's not that big a deal to me since it doesn't really matter how many I use, right? A limit on index cards doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the book and it has to be better than the grocery receipts I was using before. But here I am now and didn’t even get to the brainstorming exercise the book mentioned. I guess I’ll need to continue that part tomorrow…
TT
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