Hello friends and welcome back to WIP Wednesday, the blog series where I cry about my current WIP, at present a portal fantasy tentatively titled Trials of the Windsong Goddess.
You may notice that my word count total has not grown as expected since my last update, which is largely thanks to a particularly stubborn onset of writers’ block. This particular instance was especially frustrating because I had just gotten to a major scene that I was really excited to write, yet every time I opened my document, no single configuration of words seemed adequate to convey this pivotal moment of the story. I probably wrote, and subsequently deleted, about two thousand words, over the course of maybe eight or ten different versions. And with each failure, my enthusiasm dimmed while my anxiety reasserted itself.
Despite the arrival of July, and with it Camp NaNoWriMo, something I had counted on to help propel me through this first draft, I still struggled to motivate myself to just get over it and move on.
Eventually, I just had to bull rush my way through. It took more time (five hours for less than five hundred words) and energy (five hours for less than words) than I ever want to spend on a scene again, but at long last I was able to move on. Was it pretty? Abso-fucking-lutely not. But it got me past the blockade.
Sometimes, the scenes we anticipate writing the most, the ones we look forward to, can be the ones that trip us up more than even the ones we dread. That quest for perfection, to bring into being that which has been percolating in our heads for days, weeks, months can mean that we will never be satisfied with our verbal interpretation of it. That’s part of writing. But so is accepting less than the best is okay, even if only for just right now.
Until next time, friends, may your writing be plenty and your struggles be few.
Kerry Share
Just Another Struggling Writer 
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