Picking things up, putting 'em down...

It's a well-known technique for writers - putting a work aside, and then coming back to it with fresh eyes, motivation, or ideas.  After a couple of fallow months I got around to picking through the thriller again, and I'm feeling quite good for doing so.  I've been playing around - as I've mentioned in a past post - with a early-teen/young adult story which is, I think (and to continue the agricultural allegory,) in the fullness of time going to be quite a fertile row, or whatever.  But to labour a point, it needs fertilising, and to lay fallow itself.  Annoyingly, I don't seem clever or inspired enough - any of the time - to be able to string together a whole book's worth of good ideas without putting it aside at least once.  So that one's out to pasture, and the thriller's come back into the stable.

Maybe it's the genre, or maybe it's because parts of this story have been kicking around my head for so long, but I haven't had too much trouble getting the words out, and it makes me wonder if the reason I put it aside was a blockage of another sort - perhaps an emotional one on my part: an I'm not good enough kind of blockage, perhaps.  Think of it like a golfer getting the putting yips, perhaps - either way, it seems apparent that I can only write constructively on a project when the drive and inspiration together outweight the self-doubt.

Putting things aside in another way, I haven't been surfing since I got back from the 'naki.  I've had some truly beautiful, cold bike rides up and over Mount Cargill, heading out towards Blueskin Bay with snow-capped mountains on the skyline.  I've been looking for surf, mostly found none but once or twice blown it out because I can't be doing with getting cold on a miserable day.  Maybe I'm just going to have to mentally put my surfing aside until the elements align, and just pick up the bike instead and see what happens.