And as it seems always to be, when the moment is almost here - and this can be any moment planned for, waited for, prepared for - it suddenly seems to be much harder, much more frightening. The impulse to give up and retreat to the familiar is so strong. I suppose it is some sort of protective instinct from primitive times when change was probably deadly. It seems that last period of time is the hardest and worse than all that went before.
Of course I am woefully unprepared. My excuse is how can you prepare for the unknown but actually I've been doing my ostrich thing and sticking my head in the sand. So I have to get myself moving, get my ducks in a row as it were. Change is happening, I have to go with it, I may as well be prepared.
And above all that, I have to keep writing! This book, I dream it, parts of it pop into my head when I am at work or in the shower, characters suddenly speak to me at the most inopportune times. And yet when I am writing I am almost paralysed and can only write maybe 800 words at a time. Usually I write around 2000 or 3000 words. I was baffled, it was like there was some sort of inarticulate block in my head stopping my fingers, and all the words were stuck behind that block, a word traffic jam.
Today it came to me as I was avoiding idiots in the shopping centre carpark (totally another story), the reason why I am having this difficulty. It is actually two things causing the problem. One, my mind is jumbled with where I currently am in the book and what is going to happen further on. Vague ideas, pictures and words are mixed together and need to be sorted into chronological order before I can write them. Two, I have almost paralysed myself with the fear that my writing skills are not up to the story unfolding in my head so that I am in fact afraid to write in case it is not good enough.
Well that's kind of weird since the story is in my head so it is actually my story to write. But also of course I can understand my own convoluted thinking - lucky since who else will! Now that I understand I am afraid my writing skills are not good enough, I can give myself my patented pep talk and get myself moving again. It's a pretty straight forward talk - I just remind myself over and over that I have done many things I didn't think I could do and all I have to do is the bit I'm doing now and the rest will follow, it always does.
So now, more than ever, I need to write every day until I have confidence again that I can do this and do it better than anyone else because only I know the story and the characters. I've already scrapped what I did and started again because the story and the characters changed so much. I'm happy with how it's going now and the rest of the story is rushing into my head. So all I have to do is free up my fingers to write and kick out this fear of failure from my head. Oh, and face a completely unknown future! Piece of cake :)
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