Many of you will have heard of Writer's Block. Some of you may have been so unfortunate as to have experienced it.

You can't produce anything. The stories have died, the characters become uninteresting and worst of all your drive to continue just slowly ebbs away. It is a terrible affliction that can cripple a writer and usually strikes at the worst possible time: when you have almost no time left until the deadline.

Writer's Block killed my Nanowrimo dreams. I just couldn't get the story off the ground. I know the characters and all the events that need to take place, but for some reason it just won't all come together. So when the screenplay competition presented itself I thought: Now THAT I can do!

Now it turns out there are actually several competitions with deadlines in the next few weeks that I would love to get scripts into. Options galore right?


Right.....


So what do you call the opposite of writer's block?

I started on my script a few days ago. Baring some unfortunate interruptions (having to actually work for a living sucks sometimes) I have made great progress. 20 pages written of what I estimate will be about 100 total. Not bad if I do say so myself. Might even make the early deadline at that rate...

If I wasn't getting sidetracked writing out the plot notes for a book idea I just had. Three pages of notes just for the opening chapter and don't get me started on the mythology. (No good for Nanowrimo as for some reason I started writing this one in Dutch... never tried writing anything in Dutch before. I surprised how well it's going).

Oh and then there's this other series of fantasy stories (5 or 6) I've bee working on for a while now. Suddenly I've been having loads of ideas for them too.

Until recently my writing had stagnated. Badly. I hadn't written anything for nearly a year! Now that I am finally motivated to write again I get this overload of "inspiration" and can't seem to focus on any one project.

I know it's about self-discipline and concentration. But to be honest those are not my best character traits. Anyone know any good mental exercises for that?