The Schizophrenia Bit Explained

Target word count duly clocked up - in fact yesterday was a good day. I exceeded my target. I'm feeling smug.This does not always happen, which leads me, nicely* to the nub of todays outpourings: The Schizophrenia Bit Explained.
     Today I am full of drive, ready to open the current draft of the new book, Recycling Dads, and crack right on. Today I love my story, my characters (even the nasty ones) and I can't wait to get with them again, find out where they'll take me. I am happy and enthused and this is good.
     But this is not always the case. When 'yesterdays' go wrong and the words jam and those characters just won't commune with me, subsequent 'todays' are bleak; beset with foreboding. I dread opening that draft. It is not my friend. We both, writer and story, are strangers to each other. It's an utterly un-nerving state of being and there's a voice in my head, one that grates and whines, one that undermines Fragile Confidence and screams at me, things like:

                                  What makes you think you can do this writing thing, fool?

      Your story is rubbish - best place for it is the shredder
   
                                                                        GET A PROPER JOB

           Laughable, that's what you are, laughable

                                                You call that a plot? Cat's cradle more like

 Then it whispers, Gollum-like:

          Give up. Give up. Give up...

      But I won't give up. Doing that Gollum impression is always a mistake. It irritates me. Fortunately the voice does not know this.
     I shut it out, have a cuppa, go for a walk, employ a few avoidance strategies (but never the ironing) and persuade myself after a suitable period of procrastination that my close acquaintance, Fragile Confidence, needs me to be strong. So I am... and I open up the draft... and I write some words while I murmur my much used mantra, 'any words are better than no words, any words are better than no words, any words are better than no words'.
      This is just one form of my writing-induced Schizophrenia. I'll fill you in on its other manifestations (there are a few) in my next blog. 
      Not wishing to sound unkind, I do so hope some of my fellow writers recognise this condition. If not, and I find myself alone in my writerly schizophrenia, Fragile Confidence may have a break down. She may never recover.



*Am I allowed to use this word, its root being 'nice', if I want to be taken seriously as a writer? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Worry, worry, worry. FC