I had a pretty decent day of work today, rewriting work I'd done earlier in the week and getting a little further, though not as far as I'd hoped. I realized that one reason I may have such difficulty sticking with work and keep escaping to play games of solitaire or to see what Sarah Palin is doing or to check to make sure we still have a stock market is that every single word matters.
I thought I was getting bogged down because I knew that I was going to do draft after draft and just knowing that the draft I was doing was not going to be the last sapped my strength. But it's more than that. Finding the exact word and creating the perfect moment in a storyline is a major responsibility. Talk about a load on your shoulders. Just a line can make all the difference in whether I can move on or not.
I keep looking for various methods to make the work easier. I've hoped that my martial arts training would somehow transfer to writing, but it's been six years so I don't think I should expect much to come from that. Plus, let's face it, I'm not that great a martial arts student so even if something did transfer how much good would it do me? A number of years back I had a six-week period when I thought that writing in a journal each morning was going to turn my life around. I was wrong. Then this past summer I read that meditation can improve concentration. So I tried that a few times. I thought it helped once, but then I couldn't remember to meditate each day. So, so much for that.
Then today I was wondering about some kind of word anxiety therapy. I was thinking that the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators could run some kind of therapy salon.
I'd pay to go to that if it included lunch.
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