If you work out a way to lock the ego up for the duration of writing, let the rest of us know! I think the mark of a good writer is that they always think they could be better, so they keep trying. Neil Gaiman has a good piece of advice: write the first draft, stick it in a drawer for a year, then come back to it. You will have totally fresh eyes and be able to rewrite, making it so much MORE awesome than it was already. Then try and get it published!

Hope the card arrived? Well done on the writing and the flapjacks, that’s 2 things you did You are half way there See the positives!

You raise an interesting question - how does the writer step out the way of the story? Unfortunately, I know of no hard and fast rules. All I can recommend is read LOTS and try and see how the greats do it. My suspicion is that you will find the characters in those stories have their own voice. They live on the page because they lived in the writers mind - rather than forcing your own words into the book, try and let the characters speak through you.

Tricky, yes, but practice helps. Keep writing and it will come!

I’m not tied totally into my goals - I wrote bugger all yesterday, for example - but I do know I need *something* or else I will never get done. The most productive I’ve been all year is the two months where I had “writing lunches”. Most lunchtimes I would take the netbook to the library at work and write. I had a goal of 500 words a day, and most days I actually turned in more like 600 or 700. Some days, of course, there was nothing to show for it, but I liked the focus and the structure. I’m still feeling my way through the whole writing ‘process’, but long experience with the whole blogging and thesis-writing thing has shown me that, whilst I need a long time to get the ideas straight in my head, I also need to finally just sit down and bash at the keyboard. The end result isn’t always (rarely) what I was expecting, but it does tend to be good. I faff around making notes and charts and maps and drafting chunks, but that is all wasting time really. Displacement activity. In a way, all those notes actually stifle me because I feel the need to constantly refer to them and somehow that blocks the flow.

Right now, for instance, even though I have to start over, a large part of me is held back because of the 20,000 words I’ve written already. I feel the NEED to pull them into the new version, even though they don’t fit. I know if I do try and rewrite them in, it is going to backfire, because the new lead character is so different to the previous guy, but… It’s hard to let go.

So today I have given myself leave to read over what I’ve done already, just to refresh myself. And then, starting on Monday, it is Writing Lunch time again. I’m allowed the notebook which lists the character names and their salient points (eye colour, weapon of choice, siblings etc) and the map of the area, but that is it for ‘notes’. Fresh start. The old draft is being archived on a totally different machine so I won’t be tempted.

Let’s see what happens…