I’m progressing through my randomly generated list of twenty words, writing something from a single word which Google chose for me. I’ve just finished ‘needless’ which inadvertently included the next word ‘wasteful’. It was a complete fiction but based on memories of working in a hotel kitchen many, many years ago. I was just a waitress but I became familiar with how a professional kitchen works. My story would never happen in real life, totally preposterous, but within its own fictional world I think it worked.
So far I have written from these words: last, donkey, spiffy, lumber, taboo, root, heat and carriage and to be honest, once I’d got an idea the story followed pretty smoothly. The one I’m least satisfied with is ‘donkey’ so when I finish the twenty maybe I will go back to the topic and write another piece. After Christmas and the New Year I’m hoping to get some new technology because I’m having problems at the moment – hence my next Radwinter novel is still lurking in the publishing wings. This stoppage seems to have put a block on me in some way – I’m still writing new pieces here, still writing a couple of stories a month for my writing groups, still completing the other challenges I set myself… but… the big but…
I guess all writers think about the day when for whatever reason, they can’t write, or worse they do write but they can plainly see it’s rubbish, or the worse day, when they write and can’t tell that it’s rubbish! I know my writing has diminished – when I first gave up the day job, I would wake early and write, I would write during the day, I would write late into the light – becoming both a lark and a night owl. I would also be writing in my head when I was away from my laptop – my story would be running, the characters engaging, the scenery vivid, the action active!
Yes, things change, but maybe I’ve just become complacent and too easily distracted – maybe I should ask my husband to hide my phone, maybe I should disable social media, maybe I should do more exercise, go for walks – not a favourite activity but maybe I’d distract myself from not enjoying plod plod plod by thinking about the people in my head and checking on what they are getting up to! I’ll let you know!
Lois Elsden 