The Writer Is Dead.

Hi everyone:)

I have been trying, relentlessly, to write something decent on this for a very long time. It's not that I've got Writer's Block, as I have done so many times before, it's just that I seem to have wandered down a road where there is only one story - and one story alone - that is in my head at the moment. Banging it's angry little fists on the interior of my brain, calling out to me that I must put all of my creative juices into bringing it to life. This story began this very time last year, when I was sitting in the South of France beside the pool, letting my mind - rife with unexpected and tantalising ideas - drift through all sorts of stories and plots. And then I found something, something that got me really excited, something that made me snap out of my stupor long enough to realize that I might just have stumbled across something that could be incredible, if I got it right.

But that's the thing. I can't get it right. I have the characters perfected - with their backgrounds and life stories all planned out. I have countless settings at my disposal - all equally detailled in my mind. And yet, when I try and piece them together, it all seems to fall apart. It is the single most infuriating thing I have ever experienced, trying from different angles and perspectives, only to end up with hitting the 'Delete' button at the end of one long, hard graft. And the more frustrated I got, the more adamant that this story just wasn't going to work, the more fresh, brilliant ideas and plots and characters appeared...Only, unlike before, when all my ideas where connected to different stories, different stories COMPLETELY, these all went back to this same, one idea. So I tried, and tried, and tried, and still try to this day - because I KNOW that I could make this amazing, if I got it right. So that's why I haven't been posting - since January - actually, because I have become drunk on this one single story.

It's got me questioning wether or not I should be a writer - simply because I can't be much of a writer, if the thing I'm struggling most is the WRITING part. If I'm totally honest, I'm kind of ashamed that this has become so agonizing, so difficult. Once, I could just sit in front of a computer and write - the words would flow easily, everything would come naturally. Now, it's all stiff and awkward - and although sometimes I get bursts of the old me, and I can write fifty-or-so pages ago, I merely curse them by the end of it, after I've written long into the night, because they aren't as good - as perfect - as I want them to be. As I think this story, these characters, deserve.

So I've decided I need a culture shock - something to get my pulse racing, my mind thinking, once more. I need to go back and remember what it was that got me writing before, what started my thirst for all of this in the first place. What made that wide-eyed five year old girl, on her first day of primary school, turn to look at her Mum and say: "I'm going to learn how to write, Mummy, and then that's all I'm ever going to do".