I keep a journal. Typically, that's the only writing I'm involved in from day to day. Besides journaling, I write essays for school and emails to my sister. I have a sizable stash of story scraps, and I would like to make progress on them, even if I only worked on an atom from a molecule of a particle of a chapter, but finishing a project is quite another thing from starting one.
How do I feel about the process?
This is my one-word summary of how I feel about the writing process: paralyzed.
I once spent somewhere around two hours thinking about background details for a scene that had played itself out in my head. The result of those two hours of pondering was two sentences penciled into a notebook that had laid open with a vengeance all the while I was thinking. This is why I say I feel paralyzed during the writing process. I suppose I get too concerned with the details. Often I start wandering into the realm of genealogy, wondering who the main characters parents are, who their parents' parents are, and so on and so forth (I even drew a pedigree chart) with no end in sight! It's not that I think that details like that are imperative to the story and has to be written out, it's just that I'm curious to know these things.
Once I move past the paralysis stage and get started on a story, the main challenge for me is to see it through to the end. My tendency is to start writing a story and then leave it unfinished for long stretches of time. Sometimes I come back to an incomplete story and start working on it again, but what usually happens here is that I poke and prod it a bit before leaving it alone again, perhaps in the hopes that when I come back to it five years hence it will have developed itself into an entire series. Sadly, I have not finished a solitary story in years, that is, until January 17th of this year when I wrote a picture book called "Deep Within the Forest." It was immensely satisfying to have not only started, but finished writing something!
What am I reading now?
Pat of Silver Bush by L. M. Montgomery
The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
Total word count: 1,278
(Excluding the number of words from my journal entries).
