Spent a good 8 hours writing a measly 4 pages of my young adult novel today. 4 pages in 8 hours, that's 2 hours per page! Ridiculous! Give me a report for school and I can whip up twice that many pages in half the time but a story I'm writing for fun and it just drags. Shouldn't it be the opposite?!? Each page was painstakingly written, read, edited, read again, re-written, read twice more then the next page started and the vicious cycle continues on and on and on with reading and re-writing happening every few paragraphs. This may make for a kick-ass story in the end (hopefully) but it also makes for S L O W writing until then.
The story has been flowing fairly well up to this point but once I reached my first pivotal fight scene I choked. Writers block kicked in and I used every excuse in the book to justify my lack of return to the keyboard and my microsoft office saved document. Today I decided that a kick to my own booty was needed and I swiftly applied said kick and sat my butt down at the computer desk to open previously mentioned saved document. I read it, read it again and then read it once more for good measure. The idea well was still dry. So I paced, I cussed, I played some really great old-skool music and I forced myself to just start writing. Even if the scene was crap and made no sense my fingers were going to keep typing.
It worked! Typing through the writers blocked forced the creative juices to flow and the fight scene was born. Of course it has proven to be the toughest scene I've ever written with a zillion re-writes, edits and improvements already and I'm not even finished with it yet. That's right, 8 hours and a zillion edits and the scene has yet to be completed. Fight scene choreography sucks, at least for this girl. I plan on sleeping on it, hopefully the rest of the scene will choreograph itself in my dreams then flow neatly through my mind, out of my fingers onto the keyboard and into the page where it belongs.
An author can only hope. :)
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