Breaking Through Walls · 7:08pm Jul 23rd, 2023
I've never been especially good at doing things quickly. I have to take time to think about what I'm doing, mull over details, make sure I'm following guidelines.
This transfers of course to writing. I think the understanding most writers have is to just go ahead and get the ideas out, keep the momentum going, worry about editing later. I can't really bring myself to do that, I have to spend time thinking about characterization and plot and phrasing and agonize over any typo I see. My average rate tends to be in the range of 500 words per hour.
I'm also conscious though that the pacing of my writing tends to be rather glacial in of itself. Plots take a lot of time to get things rolling unless I make a conscious effort to eschew as much as possible.
I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to get past any of this, and I don't know how much I can rationalize my tendencies as being acceptable for a writer. Part of the reason I stopped taking commissions was that I couldn't reasonably believe that my output was enough to meet the demand, not to mention being nowhere near enough to make ends meet.
Also, you know, made harder by the fact that finding the motivation to start working on a thing is hard.
Being creative is hard. Being professionally creative is hard. I don't know how many of these walls are limitations that I should be trying to walk around and how many I need to force myself to break through.
I don't know you and can't speak to your personal experiences, but in my case, some of those walls turned out to be my body's way of telling me I had pushed it too hard and it didn't trust me to expend energy responsibly anymore, physically and creatively
So, I guess, be careful of which walls you try to plow through