The worst feeling

[ThisAdamGuy]

You know that feeling when you spend hours trying to write, but you just can't get into the right brainspace, but you force yourself to do it anyway even though every single word feels wrong, and when you finally call it quits you know you're just going to delete it all and start over tomorrow so you may as well not have bothered at all, except you know that if you hadn't tried you'd go to bed feeling like you wasted an entire day by not writing, which is even worse than wasting an entire day writing badly?

I hate that feeling.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

You know that feeling when you spend hours trying to write, but you just can't get into the right brainspace, but you force yourself to do it anyway even though every single word feels wrong, and when you finally call it quits you know you're just going to delete it all and start over tomorrow so you may as well not have bothered at all, except you know that if you hadn't tried you'd go to bed feeling like you wasted an entire day by not writing, which is even worse than wasting an entire day writing badly?

I hate that feeling.

No, I don't delete what I wrote, but save it. Then take a break. Most of the time, what I wrote earlier turns out to be good, I just need to change it a little or continue. So don't delete what you've written.

It can also serve as a 'springboard' for ideas, or further development, even if you don't use it.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Have only felt this when I had a deadline looming and just did not want to write what I was supposed to. Then again, I usually have enough little projects sitting around that if I feel bored or at a dead end on one, I can just pick up a different one.

Heck, more annoying for me is when I am "in the zone" on one story and ideas for another one keep "jumping the line," demanding my attention.

 

[RepresentingCaution]

Procreate, and you will no longer have that problem because you'll get interrupted before you waste too much time trying to write.

 

[Grimrose1]

Oh don’t worry I made a treasure for your enjoyment and guess what? The mass produced model just shot itself by going by flawed true.

 

[Fox-Trot-9]

Yep, all the time, but I don't let that stop me. I just copy/paste that stuff into my scraps document for that story and start again. The faster you can get over that, the faster you can get stuff going again. For example, out of the 1.4k pages I've written of VR!, I've got over 200 pages of scraps that I took out of it.

 

[JayMark]

You know that feeling when you spend hours trying to write, but you just can't get into the right brainspace, but you force yourself to do it anyway even though every single word feels wrong, and when you finally call it quits you know you're just going to delete it all and start over tomorrow so you may as well not have bothered at all, except you know that if you hadn't tried you'd go to bed feeling like you wasted an entire day by not writing, which is even worse than wasting an entire day writing badly?

I hate that feeling.

I know that feeling.

If it isn't utter garbage I move it to the rejected cuts file (I have one for every story that I am writing now), which I go back to and pull ideas from. I've written entire short stories that were stream of conciousness insanity that no one would ever subject themselves to reading, yet still gave me a resource to pull characters and ideas from. I can also write something fun that I feel is witty and amazing, but also feel like it will lose almost every reader ever, that stuff also goes in rejected cuts.

Sometimes I feel like something is uninspired or bad and it's actually a bridge or set-up for a convergence of events. If it isn't terribly written, then it just needs polish and spice. So in essence, I just didn't write the finished copy on the first try and need three edits instead of two or one.

And sometimes writing is just not the best move for me. I need time for ideas to roll around in my head about how interesting things worth sharing with the reader might move forward at the micro level before drafting.

 

[Cipiteca396]

No Adam, I can't recall the feeling of writing badly, nor the disappointment of going to bed knowing I didn't do my best, nor how it feels to write anything at all.

Only the writer's block. Only staring at the last thing I wrote, and wondering how to continue it. Only the disappointment of knowing that I'll probably never continue it, and nobody expects me to.

---

It's kind of a joke, but Frodo's voice in my head makes it sound way too serious.

 

[WinterTimeCrime]

I used to sit at a desk for hours and lament. Now I just spin a random number generator (less than 1k), use the Cold Turkey Writer app to disable everything on my computer, and write until I reach that number.

If I'm really feeling masochistic that day, I do word-count roulette (which is basically me rolling the wheel and writing each number until it lands on the one I previously chose).

 

[LesserCodex]

I know that feeling very well, hell I've been stuck in that cycle for the past week, I would often end up restoring my deleted ideas thinking I could add more or improve it only to delete them again! Like seriously I cant make up my mind.