Inertia
Fleshing out a few thoughts for one of the two story ideas I've been kicking around. This used to be much easier. I don't know what's different now besides a hundred distractions, a shut down mind, or any number of other things where I could lay the blame. I know the trickery which makes this all work. I've done it before. I just can't seem to get it to work this time.
Have you ever wanted to do something but just couldn't get started? Often, the secret is to just jump in and do it — break past the inertia of stasis and fall naturally into the inertia of motion. I think overcoming the stasis is the hardest part of this equation. Usually, keeping things in motion is the easy part. There are exceptions to this, but from what I've seen, it takes much more energy to get things started than it does to keep them moving. (I think that's the case in physics, too, but it's been so long since I've studied physics even I don't trust that statement.)
Writing about not being able to get anything written is such a cliché, too. Bah. I wouldn't exactly call it a block. I'd call it a spinning of the wheels without forward motion — very similar, but in my mind, different. When I think of a block, I think of it as nothing happening at all. In this case, things are happening, they're just not getting fully and properly expressed. Yet.
I've been rereading The Artist's Way over the last few weeks, an excellent book for getting unstuck. I've not been doing any of the exercises in the book, though. This is, perhaps, a fatal blow to the process. Getting unstuck involves more than just reading, which is a passive activity (there's an oxymoron for you). You've got to get out in the mud, give things a shove, get your hands dirty. They can always be cleaned off later.
I do need to move past the "making notes" phase and more into the "just write some shit down" phase, though. I can sit and research a thing to death, and that in itself is either a) fun or b) yet another way to procrastinate. And since this is at an early phase, it's just for me — I don't have to show anyone, and if it reads like trash, so what. It, too, can always be cleaned up later.
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On Goodbye, Blossom, Martha said: We can still dress up and go to Laury's. Or Aubrey's. Or even Soho's, if/when I get over being mad.