Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
Deidre, yeah, that's gotten to be my case now too. I used to have ideas exploding in my mind all the time. So many in fact that I had trouble getting them down fast enough. or in a coherent way. Now I have to go through a ritual of "checking in" to the world before I start my writing and blocking out all external distractions before I start writing. I remember a famous author once said that something like this would happen, and they were totally write. I don't remember their exact quote but it was something along the lines of "When you begin, the ideas and words will gush from you like a spring of water. But as you mature and the more you write, the longer and more in depthly you will have to live in the world before you can write about it."
I've somewhat reached that stage where I have to live in a world for a while before I can write anything about it. I think it involves how you "see" your world. I'm also fairly certain that writers block is simply failure by the writer to fully see their world. It's like writing about your family. The better you know them the better you're able to write about them.
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Hemingway said it well too. An author needs a built in s**t detector. Perhaps it's the development of such that brings the flow of ideas into a controllable stream rather than being a gushing torrent. I mean I understand in the old days editors would get what came to be known as "Shaggy God stories" quite often. New writers would get what they thought was a new idea, but was really a shop worn or even cliche'd idea that had been run into the ground.