Why I Can't Write Fiction Anymore (or why it's currently not working at least)

[rockinlibrarian]

I'm sure I've mentioned that the reason I actually started WRITING stories as a child (instead of just playing make-believe-- I was plenty enough good at THAT sort of storytelling without any other prompting) was that I kept having awesome narrative dreams that needed to be written down and shared. In my teen years I actually came up with tons of

Comments

Kim Aippersbach here

[anonymous]

Forget the Terrigen Mist and the Celtic Ramadan (which-why the heck not? I can see a lot of cool possibilities in the Druid/Djinn pairing!)(also, spring cleaning by vacuuming up evil spirits is brilliant! (and fits in quite terrifyingly with a nightmare I once had about all the spiders I've vacuumed up still being alive inside the vacuum cleaner-shudder))-I want to know about the pet store. Why did they need the pets so badly? (Maybe you could write that scene and find out for me!)

You have to find ways to trick the Inner Critic into leaving you alone. One thing I do is write ideas down in a ratty old coil notebook. "These aren't serious ideas," I tell myself. "Don't worry, this isn't going to be the real story or anything; I'm just messing around. Nothing to see here, move along now." Or I tell myself that this novel doesn't matter: it's just part of the 10,000 hours I need to put in to master my craft. It's not like I'm going to publish it or anything.

And when nothing else works, remember that the Inner Critic is proof you're a real writer. Amateurs think everything they write is brilliant. ;)