Lethologica

My brain is going to mush. I blame a stressful combination of work, writing and personal issues for that. You see, I managed to start suffering from lethologica, but not in any clinical sense, and I don't think it's necessary to go see a specialist but it is impacting negatively on my writing.

You see, when a person wants to write a sentence, they usually have an idea of what they want to say, so they sit down and write it down using the words and phrases that best articulate their thoughts at that time. I thought it might also be because English isn't my first language. I find myself knowing what I want to say in Afrikaans, but having to write it in English and somehow those thoughts don't always translate well. But it is part of the writer's bane, I suppose.

At the moment my head is swimming with story, and every piece of the story demands my immediate, undivided attention. The words want to break out and tell the story to the point that my fingers struggle to keep up with my brain. I think if it was up to my enthusiasm, this novel would be finished this week.

I have spoken to a couple of fellow writers, and read the same thing on a couple of author blogs and I must say that I've had a similar experience. The first 10 000 words were the hardest. It took me four months to hit 10k, and only two weeks to write the next 3000. I would like to describe this as the "honeymoon" period in my writing. The story is well on its way and the only thing standing in its way is the fact that it has to be channelled through me, an ordinary human being that has to try and keep one foot in the real world - if only so that I have food to eat.

I have another theory as to why there seems to be periods in time that writing just flows. There are two other writers in my writing circle, The Writing Circle That Has Yet To Be Named (although Dave calls us his fellow WITs - apparently that stands for Writers In Training) and between the thee of us we go through the same kind of writing spurts/slumps. A couple of weeks ago real life decided to get in the way of me writing and for the month of July I wrote a total of 1500 words. Disgusting, I know. But it seemed to me, and they're free to correct me if I'm wrong, that my fellow WITs had a similar issue - The words were just not getting out.

I blame the Universe, or thank it depending on what time of day you ask me. Maybe nature provides these slumps for our weary brains to rest a while, to gain perspective on our stories and give the seeds time to germinate, so to speak. It was just strange that it happened for three people roughly at the same time.

Isn't nature just wonderful?