Warring with Words

You can take what you like from that title, because although this post is about the fabled 'word wars', it has nothing to do with insults nor actual battle. Now that that's out the way, I can get on with this post.

It was yesterday when I realised that I had only written something in the order of 500 words in the last five days. Groaning into myself, I was overcome with wordy guilt. I hadn't had a week that bad since the Great Exodus to (Nameless, Hateful Island) in the Easter holidays. Needless to say, I felt a great need to remedy this. After realising that the problem lay with inspiration rather than anything else - distractions, lack of time etc. - I set about finding a way to get on with writing.

Often when you hit a barrier with writing, you just have to buck up and soldier on through it. (Remember that book 'Going on a Bear Hunt' (assuming that that's the title)? It's like that.) Either that, or you kill off the character giving you grief and roll on over their dead body. This was a case where the former was preferable, mainly because I couldn't kill her yet due to problems with a time continuum (curse you, time travel). However, I had a severe lack of actual motive, and so sat there looking like an idiot for a good few hours. Until...

Bing. You have a *NEW* message. As opposed to an old one, of course.

Who else but Dan Johnson! Despite a six hour time difference, he was up and running, raring to have what he called a 'word war'. Asking him to elaborate, he explained that a word war is basically a time window in which a group of writers write as much as is humanly possible that makes sense to their story, novel or script. The winner is the one with the most words or pages at the end. Simple, hm? That's what I thought. So it was that I found the way out of my rut.

We warred for around 45 minutes, and in that time I wrote something like 780 words, which is a pittance, because he managed to write 1350 (or thereabouts). Feeling not too dejected, I realised I had actual climbed out of my rut and fallen off of the face of the Earth, tumbling into an abyss of weirdness and utterly wonderful stuff. So now I have a veritable treasure trove of ideas, plus a place to put them. And now I'm happy.

The moral of the story is: if you're gonna write a novel, try and write sections all in one session, otherwise you lose your train of thought and get caught up in something else. It's taken me at least a week to get through this one chapter. So don't do what I did; instead, set aside some time and write when you're inspired. That's a bit of a, uh, contradiction, but still. If that made any sense, go with it. If it didn't, ignore it.

Off to novel around some more,
   Professor Pisces