I’ve been in a holding pattern for . . . several months now where literally nothing is getting written. I’m thinking about what I want to write, like, constantly, but when it comes time to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, and get the job done, I have nothing.
I don’t exactly have nothing in the literal sense of the word. I have a lot of somethings that don’t add up to anything.
This is the truest thing on the internet at this moment. I have characters I really kind of like. I have snippets of this and that. I have somethings that don’t add up to anything. And that’s almost more frustrating than having actual, literal nothing.
I can’t nail down a setting. I don’t want to set another series in Denver or even Colorado, but I feel uncentered trying to write an urban fantasy in a city I only kind of know. Would I like to go wander around Chicago the way I learned my way around Denver? Yes. Do I have that kind of time? No. Is Google Street View an acceptable substitute? Not really.
I am not connecting with the characters. I have a pair, Val(erie) and Roxy, who I decided to approach from a kind of Sherlock and Watson angle where Watson (Roxy) is the narrator but that puts me in a place of disconnect where everything that happens to Val has to also happen to Roxy otherwise she truly is just reporting it after the fact (telling, not showing . . .). So while I kind of like what I’ve written in that style, it’s not sustainable. At least not for me. And they’re the ones I’m having the least amount of trouble with.
But the biggest problem is, as the meme suggests, I don’t have a plot. At least nothing I think is good enough to pour my focus into. So, instead, I’m writing nothing. Which is also a thing I don’t like.
As writers, we have a dozen people in our ears, at any given moment, telling us, just buckle down and do it. Write the damn book.
I’m here to tell you, sometimes it’s just not that easy.
D. Gabrielle Jensen 