A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Sixty-Five


I am wondering if it may not be time to push myself a bit.  I've felt a little stagnant this week, which is not a long time, really, and it may well be a result of stress to do with issues I have alluded to previously.  I'm keeping up with my regiment, mostly, and not finding it too difficult to make something happen, even if it is not a great piece of work. While that makes me very happy and even proud, I'm also wondering if it might not be time to agitate my process a bit with something more.

In part, my thinking is that I am at a point now where the current work level is not putting me into the right mental space, and it may be that I need to change it up a bit to get more done.   I think pushing myself to do some added work may provide that element that pushes me forwards again.  Of course, I am wondering what the end of this is, as pushing myself to keep doing more and more work each day is not a real solution in the end, at least not long term.  I will need to find other ways to challenge myself, and I am beginning to consider those questions as well.

For one thing, I think forms provide some degree of that, as do certain types of poetic exercises.  I am thinking that it may be just about providing a differing challenge, and right now, I have a sense that extending the amount of work is the right answer, but that is said with an awareness of it as a limited and largely situational change.  I just have a sense, right now, that what may be happening is that I am allowing myself to get the easy work out of the way and not going deeper for the moment.  By adding more work, I am allowing myself to purge that stuff first, then making myself stick around for the more serious work.  It is my sense that, were I to push myself in that way, I might also create an understanding of how to get to that place without the need for all those preliminaries.  Of course, it may just be that this won't pull me from my current rut, but I tend to have faith that it will, and I am fairly sure that even the second rate work I'm doing now will have some form of value for me in the future.

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