Since NaNoWriMo ended, I've been having a lot more trouble writing than I'd expected. Maintaining that level of output was obviously extremely difficult, but I had figured that cutting back my daily allowance would make things easier.
No dice. I dropped to 1000 and then 500 words a day, and I'm still not really feeling any desire to keep pushing on that story. Part of the problem is that I'm running into a complex part of the plot which I'm not really sure how to execute, so writer's block is hitting pretty hard. That's...to be expected, I guess. Part of the reason for doing NaNoWriMo was gaining a bit more experience writing something besides the early introduction to a book.
The thing is, it's not like I'm out of ideas for stories. I just sort of...burnt out on that particular story.
If I had other active projects, that probably wouldn't be as much of a problem. But I haven't worked on anything recently—any fiction project, to be clear—that made it past the early planning stages. I've got scenes, characters, subplots running around in my mind, but nothing that really resembles a coherent story arc.
Of course, as I've remarked before elsewhere, I find it difficult to develop conventional plots because I just don't alieve in evil. Whenever I'm trying to set up a conflict, I find it extraordinarily difficult to come up with a reason that the characters couldn't solve the problem before the first act.
Maybe I should just double down on that. Surprise, the rest of this sci-fi thriller is actually a rom-com!
It's not like I have any reason to believe I'd be better at writing romance, but at least then I don't have to make excuses for having happy characters. Probably. I don't actually know what's standard in those sorts of books.
We'll see what happens. I've thrown some words on the page with no clue where they'd go, but got some feel for writing that atmosphere and mood in the process. I'm unlikely to salvage it; other ideas are more appealing. Maybe I'll play around with plots over the weekend and run with one of them next week.
Is it almost Christmas already?
