Hello everyone,

This last week has been the hardest for me, as far as writing is concerned. Though I had material to write about, I just couldn’t write it the way I wanted to. For some reason, the words just slipped my mind, the moment my fingers started typing the first word. Everything that followed the first word seemed dragged, forced and blunt to the point where frustration took hold of me.

You know that inner voice that stems from lack of self-confidence and usually screams at us when we try something new that is big or something we try for the very first time and we don’t want to mess it up? Well, that voice inside me, had a party going in my head. I hadn’t heard that voice since the first month or two when I first decided to write. I thought I had quelled it, especially after the email I got from the magazine that wanted my short story. I was wrong. It’s still there and it’s getting stronger.

For the past 40 days I have been following a new daily schedule and I have set a new word limit per day. I decided to follow Stephen King’s program that I read on a book of his, titled “On Writing, A Memoir Of the Craft”. In it he suggests that writers should aim for 2000 words on a daily basis, 7 days a week. I thought it was an ambitious goal, one that only pros would manage to do. Nonetheless, I tried it and, as it turned out, I too could do it. With the exception of 4 or 5 days out of those 40, each day I wrote 2000 words, which really made me happier than I can describe. Alas, this last week I have only managed to write no more than 3500 words. It was terrible.

I don’t know what the problem was. Probably my characters and my plot lack that certain something, which in turn makes me unwilling to write. I know I have to correct my characters and my plot (for some reason I seem to have a really hard time coming up with minor events that happen to my main characters that will make them more real to the readers – myself included – and at the same time never drifting off from the main storyline). Quite frankly, at this moment I’m at a loss.

Tomorrow I want to wake up and write 1500+ words of decent prose. I want to continue this for the rest of the week. That’s my goal. I want to succeed in this.