Saturday, November 19, 2005

Shouting up from the well

Natalie Goldberg, in her books for aspiring authors, talks about the blissful moment when a writer is in full flow, imersed in their work, living the lives of their characters. She calls it 'falling down the well'. It's true - that plunge into another world is wonderful. On the otherhand there are also those days when you sit in another well altogether - the one filled with smelly stagnant water - the ideas that stink, the words that won't move from head to page. I'd like to think that in this blog I will be throwing up words of glee from a Goldberg Well but I suspect anyone willing to spend time reading this blog is likley to get some curses from the other well too, because I'm gong to be writing this to to chronicle a mini-writing sabattical I am about to start.
Sounds grand. Not so much. I wanted time off from a career that tends to leach into evenings and weekends and to wash away any decent writing time. But I didn't want to be without income or to wreck my various sources of self-employment. So, I dithered and debated and finally I compromised. One of my three sources of income is to be on hold from January, the usual jobs swapped for novel writing until I have enjoyed fifty dedicated writing days. The aim - to get the 60,000 words of fragments I currently have into a first draft by July.
Will I succeed? What will I learn along the way? Don't know - but come along for the ride and I'll let you know.

1 comment:

wst... said...

you're off to a good start may your muse stay with you