Monday, July 12, 2004

A Scene!

I actually wrote a scene this weekend!  Yaay!  I don't know if it's any good, but at least it's on paper.  Putting words on paper these days is a laborious, slogging process, each letter typed is a footstep in a bog of self-doubting heartsickness.  Ugh, ugh, ugh!  This is the time of the process which is the worst of the worst.  I remember going through this with my first novel too.  That sense of despair that I've built a house of cards and one more element will bring the whole structure crashing down into chaotic fragments.

Of course that's not true.  I wish I could turn on the words like I turn on the faucet.  But I have internal barriers to that.  Perfectionism, self doubt, laziness, procrastination; a kind of psychic state which keeps me in the illusion that solitude and repose will make me feel whole, and feeling whole is a prerequisite for creative labor.

I'm sort of lazy.  One part of my mind tells another part that if I just worry about it, then I'm really doing what needs to be done to get it accomplished.  It's a delusion, self-limiting and grafted to my creative system as surely as Doc Ock's mechanical arms were grafted to his spine.

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