And on the subject of writing, I haven’t and I am, and those sort of feel like the same thing right now. The act of writing feels indistinguishable from the state of being not-writing.
Dancing Cliffside
Published by Joyce Sully
Joyce Sully believes in magic and dragons and ghosts, but is not convinced her next-door neighbors are real. So she writes stories. Really, what else could she do? View more posts
erm… why not take a break? Refill the well, as they say?
Sweetheart, you’ve had enough crap to wade through in the past months, why, why, why would you give yourself grief and call it failure? It’s not! I dare you to find something you enjoy and let yourself enjoy it. For a while the only thing I could figure out for myself was that I loved light through leaves (there’s a blog post back in my archives somewhere). So, that’s what I loved, and very little else. And then things changed, as they are wont to do…
By the way, who the hell are these writers you know who make flamenco inside Mount Doom? I’ll bet they just don’t tell you about the days they were Sam Gamgee having to carry themselves-as-Frodo in a world absent of strawberries. They don’t mention that and all you see is the flamenco.
piff.
No pressure. Stare into space if you have to.
Ahahaha! Aw, you took my fancy metaphor and made it silly! Boo.
My problem is that I feel like I’ve done my time of recovering from the slog through shit creek. But I don’t know, maybe that’s my Me (to borrow Holly’s terms) ordering my Muse to move on whether we’ve had enough time or not.
I know other writers struggle and I don’t see it. But I do see them having fun with their writing and when I’m not having fun too, it pretty much looks like they have access to mystical powers while I’m poking in the dust with a stick.
I do like your idea about light through leaves. Maybe I need to fill up on something other than words for a while.
I think, by definition, writing isn’t filling – it can certainly be fulfilling, but it requires something BE there, ya know? Also, as much as it would be nice, it seems we don’t get to decide when we’re done needing to recover and heal. I don’t know anybody whose Muse responds well to neck-wringing.
Of course, standing on a different pile o’ dirt than you are, it sounds like a blithe, “Oh, you’ll be fine, just give it some space,” but trust me when I say I understand completely how terrible it feels when the writing isn’t doing what I think it ought, if it’s happening at all. It’s never failed, though, to be the right thing, when a break was demanded and I couldn’t help but oblige.