I have blogged about Writer’s Block several times. Those awful periods when you can’t see the keyboard through the fog. The times when I feel that I have so much going on inside my head, I just can squeeze the words out onto the page. Saturated brain. On many occasions I have been so desperate to write about something, that I forced myself on a daily basis to write about the www.dictionary.com’s Word of the Day.
Suddenly, I just can’t stop battering the words out on to the keyboard and it is a great feeling. Could it be a Purple Patch? The one I have been dreaming of?
A weekend in the company of Adrienne Dines, Barbara Large and a handful of like minded people recently has undoubtedly helped to recharge my creative batteries. I am almost ashamed to say that I spent 12 hours crouched over my laptop, virtually continuously, last Sunday. I say ashamed because I don’t get around to doing a stroke of work in either the house or the garden. I have really been wanting to rehash a manuscript I haven’t picked up for over 5 years. Over the last week or so I have completely re-written the first 10,000 words and feel a whole lot better about it. I feel the the story has changed momentum and it feels like it is finally going somewhere. It is growing, like with my characters, who I like a whole lot better this time around. They are really beginning to come alive as I get inside their heads and the plot is thickening.
Of course, there are still many months of hard graft ahead, which will be a whole lot harder when my purple patch evaporates, but if other people think my characters are believable, then it will be bloody marvellous.
I am under no illusion that my Purple Patch will pass and be substituted by a hazy fog sooner than I’d like, but for now I am making the best of it. I will be GOW Ranting about Writer’s Block again all too soon.
