Friday, January 8, 2016

Depressed ....

.... about my writing.  Or, actually, about my not writing.  I once really believed that I would always write, that I had to write, that I would be in some sense a writer.  I had no illusions: I knew I wasn't a great writer.  Just competent. But my characters spoke to me.  They were real.

Now they are silent.  I don't know whether it was the whole Henrik thing.  Or whether, being the aspie I am, that I've lost interest because I was always going to.  That it was just another of my obsessions, which as they all do, would pass.

I've just finished reading Richard K Morgan's "The Dark Defiles", and it is a quite remarkably good fantasy.  Very dark, very violent, very accomplished.  My writing is so tame compared with his.  I don't put my characters through the hell he puts his through.  And he's so fecking inventive.  Original.   His world sizzles with originality.   I'm in awe.   I hate him.  How dare he be a success when I am a failure!  :-)

 I've been trying to write Majorca Flats--it's just 20 or 30 episodes from the end--but I despair because they're not at my shoulder as they were, encouraging me to go on, or spread out across my sofas being slutty, or suffering and being happy and living as they used to.   It fascinates me how real my creations are--were--to me.  They were truly in some cases more alive than my real, living friends.  And now they are gone away.

Well, I think I must keep on trying, because once there was this pleasure and satisfaction, almost a lust for writing, for inhabiting the world my characters lived in, a world they created, not I, and perhaps it will come again.  Or maybe not.  What I really want to do is get back to ElvenSword and eviscerate it, to make it a fantasy which grabs you by the balls and the heart and keeps you up till 3 a.m. reading it.  I must make it happen, right?  But how?



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Don't worry, you'll get back to it. sometimes it just takes a push to get over the block, sometimes it takes writing an hour or two of crap before teh good stuff flows.

NPT said...

Thanks, Rex. I certainly hope so!