How to keep writing
This week's Blaugust theme is Keeping Motivated. As a victim of twelve Nanowrimos I am deeply familiar with the week three slump. Which is exactly what is happening! Funny that.
I've currently got fifteen drafts sitting around and none of them interest me. Nor could I think of anything I wanted to write. Earlier in the month I had a stack of posts, ideas, and all the verve and gusto I could possibly wish for.
These things ebb and flow and I know that about myself. I even anticipated this in my first Blaugust post. Probably not a coincidence I was also talking about writer's block.
So how to actually keep writing? Step one, find a cat to lay on you so you can't go anywhere or do anything else. That is helping focus me right now.
This is not my cat
A lot of brainstorming advice has you do an unreasonable number of ideas. Like, five, easy. Twenty, you're digging. Fifty and you're kind of breaking through into a next level chaos. Brainstorming a hundred things, blogging every day, writing fifty thousand words, going big and fast really pushes a body.
Switching up the environment is always helpful. Into the third quarter dip things can get a bit stale or repetitive. Going somewhere new or otherwise changing the environment - a new chair, the library. Music if you normally have silence, silence if you normally have music. Trying a new tactic - writing sprints, prompts, freewriting.
Just keeping going dredges up all sorts. In Nano people would start writing full recipes their characters were making. When I got stuck with what characters might do next... I had them sit down and talk about what they might do next. And when bloggers run out of steam we write about not knowing what to write.