In moments like these I comfort myself by checking out my favorite authors' websites. I have read over and over again on different websites (Neal Asher’s and Ursula K LeGuin’s among others), that writing is like everything else:
If you want to be good at it you have to do it often, write every day and accept that much of what you write is (more or less) rubbish.
I listen to that and write and write and write and reject much of what I scribble down. But sometimes, sometimes, it’s good and I feel I can believe in myself and my projects again.
Last year I started writing more and it really developed my writing, also, I got help from a fellow writer who read one of my scripts and gave me constructive criticism (and thereby opened my eyes to the weaknesses and strengths I have as a writer).
As for my poetry, I never have as big of a crisis, it comes and goes, but usually, it’s there in the background. If I get stuck on a novel, that plot becomes the basis of a poem instead and after that I get new energy and ideas to the bigger project that is the novel. The fact that my family always seem to be up to its tricks when I feel the most into my stories and really want/need to write is a subject I’ll blog about another time, since it is a whole post all by itself.
After releasing two collections of poetry (in Swedish, so I guess you guys won’t be reading them, although you’re more than welcome to buy them anyway!), I'm wondering if I have enough to get a collection of short stories together. I need to look at and read through all the prose that I saved in those dark places on my hard drive ... who knows, maybe the next big hit is hidden somewhere in the "Random texts”-folder!
By the way, it took Tolkien decades to finish The Lord of the Rings; he wasn’t even finished with it when he passed away. So I think I will wait with panicking about my own projects.
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