IWSG: Writing without a long-term plan

Hi there! Since New Year’s Day fell on a Wednesday, the January meeting of the Insecure Writers Support Group got pushed back a week. Welcome everybody!

I’m actually feeling pretty secure about a lot of writing stuff right now. I got a story draft finished during the Christmas holidays, and I’ve been making some good progress on revising short stories. I’m even up to three Race Points!

However, after reviewing my progress on my 2013 creative goals, I’ve been procrastinating on picking my writing resolutions for the new year. I’ve just come from a great writing year, but some of the most amazing parts were things that I hadn’t planned or anticipated. Maybe the thing that’s tripping me up is that setting concrete goals seems to trivialize or minimize the value of that kind of serendipitous side-journey.

I’ll probably put some kind of 2014 goals down before long; as well as the crowd over at Stringing Words, a few of my Odyssey Team Ambitious friends have been sharing their lists. But right now I’ve set some targets for January and that’s as much looking forward as I’m ready to indulge in.

 

Who’s afraid of the blank page?

Hey everybody. Hope you had great holidays and that the new year is starting off bright! I’m doing okay up here, though I’m already tired of the wintry weather in Ontario.

Just wanted to say something about an email that I got weeks ago from Writers of the Future, with a link to an article about fear of the blank page. And I realized that, though I have a lot of fears and insecurities about writing, that isn’t one of them anymore. I can get worried that I have nothing new to say, or that I won’t be able to do justice to a particular story idea. But I don’t really associate either of them with a fresh digital document. (If we’re talking about a physical blank page, then I just get angry at the notion of having to write in longhand, but that’s a different topic that I’ve already covered.)

But the blank ‘page’ on my computer screen is always something I associate with the pure joy of creativity and I usually can hardly wait to rush in, start typing and fill it up–and then hesitate after a few paragraphs when I realize I have no idea where I’m actually going, now that I’ve started writing. I’m not sure how far back in my writing history that goes. Possibly, like a lot of my writing habits, it started to gel when I was cranking out Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic in university.

So, what about you? Do you have the blank page fear? If you’re a writer, how do you tackle it?