Monday, May 17, 2010

Help! I've lost my mojo.....

Except I don’t actually know what a mojo is and the urban dictionary definition is dodgy. But if I have or had a mojo, a literary mojo, it has gone walkabout without me.

Since I finished the ghost-writing project I was working on I have hit a brick wall. Maybe it’s like the marathon runners ‘wall’ and I just have to grit my teeth through mile 22 and keep on moving. But lads, it’s scary. Sometimes I sit and stare at the blank laptop screen or page of doodles and - nothing - absolutely flippin’ nothing.

The thing that puzzled me most when I started writing was where all the words had been all the years I didn’t write. I felt they were pouring out of me in a torrent, flowing out onto page after page after page. It made me feel invincible; for a little while.

I was in for a wake-up call. Step one was getting over assuming everything I wrote was brilliant and funny and wise and warm and new. Step two was stopping obsessively checking my e-mail for word of competitions I had entered or submissions I had made to publishers who were just waiting for me to grace their establishments with my genius. I still felt invincible, just realistically so. There are thousands of people out there writing, just walk into any bookshop anywhere in the world and see the wide variety of books available. Each one of those books is by an author as committed to their work as I am to mine, most of them suffering the same pangs of doubt as I do.

I look at friends I’ve made over the last five years who have been writing for decades and will probably never see publication at this stage. But they never, ever stopped and never will – because they can’t. They may dry-up as I have for a while but this writing bug seems to be like a virus. Once it’s living in your system it can survive despite being starved on occasions. So all I have to do is wait, doodle, write snippets, journals, blogs anything - just keep giving myself the chance to write.

I’ll let yiz know if when I get my mojo back………

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