look, there's lint!

[eor]

So, yeah, I haven't been writing much.


It's been getting progressively harder for me to write anything. Perhaps it's laziness. Perhaps it's self consciousness. Perhaps it's I don't know what. I find myself in a completely dysfunctional relationship with written language.

I have plenty of bits and pieces that I think of writing, but whenever I sit down to actually write it is painful. Self editing with the backspace key until there isn't anything left. Even grocery lists don't seem to come out right. Flogging myself with guilt because I haven't responded to posts I found interesting and haven't written to people I like. Sitting for hours picking away at a few tiny bits.

I've become a literary anorexic.

"Writing the lines as they come to me,
scratching them out, almost immediately.
Don't know what it's done to me." -- The Bangles "Return Post"

Comments

[kryptyd]

I don't write as you know, apart from grocery lists (awesome ones, I might add), so I don't have knowledgeable input on this subject. However, what you are describing there sounds extremely similar to what a lot of the writers I most admire say when they are feeling down. So you are not deficient. This is a writing thing, feeling like this and looking at blank pages. I've looked at a lot of blank pages and felt like an idiot as a painter plenty of times

[eor]

But you do write! You write posts which I can't seem to get it together to reply to. That's the kind of writing I'm having the problem with.

I never could do that other kind of writing, the stuff involving plots and characters and anything over a page or so. The best I can do there is scare up with the occasional plot bunny, which dashes away if no one else can catch it. :)

[eor]

Go to this link and look at the 4th question down. It's truly punishment, but I think you'll like it.

http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/digest.cgi?N=1489