I have come to a hiatus again. I don’t call it writer’s block. That makes it seem as though you can always be rattling the keys (or pushing the pen). As though writing fiction streams out like water through a pipe. You sit down, turn on the tap, write, then turn it off and go away and think about the shopping until the next time.
For me, writing is a lumpy process. It forms clots around the available plot. When there is no plot available it runs thin. It’s not that I don’t know what will happen, it’s rather that I’m not sure how it will happen. And in the difference between what and how, lies the gulf between humdrum and predictable or exciting and unexpected.
I have convinced myself that it is a self evident truth that if you work out a plot using your logical, rational left brain, then any reader can work it out too. Whether this is true or not, is a moot point, but I am locked into that way of thinking, so for me it is a given. Hence, I rely on my unpredictable, spasmodic and erratic right brain to provide me with direction, and at the moment it is twisting itself into knots of unknowing. The more you try to make it happen, the more constipated it feels.
Yet I also have this wonderful confidence that something is brewing. The more I relish the expectation of it, the more excited I get. And when it finally emerges, I know from experience that it will seem as though it was always there, just waiting to be discovered. The right brain is like that: timeless and forever pregnant with a swirling potential, just waiting for a clot to form.
Salatheel 