Writing Can Burn
So last summer my mind was on fire! I was writing some of the best material I have written in my life. Ideas were flying from my head to paper I couldn’t even find the time to write most of the short story projects I outlined. And then back in November I really got to cooking when I started “Blackened Westerns: Volume One” project.
This project has become one of my most ambitious endeavors to date. The fact that I’m still obsessed with it, still being motivated to continue writing it, all speaks volumes on how much I want to finish this. Actually, I don’t want to finish it. Finish Volume One, yet, but I hope that I can continue escaping to the Realm of Morgue for years, and years to come. Hell, I’ve already been there for years, and years now.
I have a journal entry from back in mid-October entitled “Writing Binge in November”. I had been writing nearly 2,000 words every night on stories. I had written, and completed several short stories, and was one of the most active members on the FWO fantasy writer’s forum. In fact, I finished Part One of Blackened Westerns: Volume One back then, and had started on Part Two—the entire book is broken into multiple parts of at least four.
But sometime in January I was dragging my tail. My daily quota was dropping, some days there wasn’t even a quota at all. The story slipped away from me, other things started taking priority. Then I realized something that I had suspected for years: I was going through my annual burn out.
It’s true. I spend several months at a time writing like a wild fire that can’t be contained. Every free moment I get I’m going to be typing away on a keyboard, or scribbling in a notebook. Some of my best work comes about during these committed sessions. But eventually my mind starts to surrender, give in, and then give out. Like a well that is tapped dry I just can’t fathom writing another coherent sentence.
These “burn outs” last a couple months or longer. Usually during those times my neurotic personality takes the helm, and I’m off on some other pipe dream, or just finding new hobbies, and new interest to occupy my leisure time. For instance, I took up the pastime of trapping during the winter months, enjoying the cold, outdoors. I also took up kickboxing, and studying martial arts philosophy, and techniques. Nothing too serious really, but I don’t have the time or money to go pay someone to learn a martial arts. Even then those people rarely teach the philosophy behind the arts.
But I finally got back around to browsing through my writer’s notebook a couple weeks back. I’m ashamed to admit that I can barely read my own writing sometimes. I have worse handwriting than my left-handed dad. But I was able to revive the stories, the ones I had been working on, in my mind, and pick up almost exactly where I left off. I gotta say, without that writer’s notebook, or the dozens and dozens of Writer’s Journal pages on my laptop I probably would’ve been lost! There is so much in my notes that I had forgotten about regarding the story, and characters, and themes, and…yeah, you get the picture.
As I wrote in my Writer’s Journal on June 3rd 2010, “Here I go again! Back in the saddle!”
