Mood Swings
Photo by Jonas John, Creative Commons
Yesterday I was in a crappy mood. Coincidentally (or not) my day started off with the frustration of working on a 7000-word short story that was going nowhere fast. I’d spent nearly two weeks working on what was turning out to be a stinker of a story. So I have to ask myself, was my story putting me in a bad mood, or was my mood sapping my creative mojo?
In any case, I think I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I finished the story (though it still sucks) and hopefully when I’m in a better mood, I can find a way for it to suck less. But in the meantime, I’m a little concerned about having the quality of my output affecting the rest of my life. To be fair, I think I pushed myself harder this week than I normally do. Maybe some video games are in order, a little StarJeweled to clear the mind?
Do bad writing days ever put you in a bad mood? How do you cope? Or how do you avoid it altogether?
Yeah. Sometimes writing puts me in a bad mood. But if i don’t write i put myself in a bad mood as well. It’s a conundrum.
Chocolate always helps (in small doses). And sometimes walking away for half an hour is enough. Other times i just push through it.
I’m getting better, though. I think my regular self-reminder that not everything i write will be golden is helping. Most of the time.
Good on you for finishing the story. You might come back to it later and find there’s not actually that much wrong with it, or that what is wrong isn’t too hard to fix 🙂
p.s. is there a way to get back to the home page of your blog without having to edit the address line?
Usually, writing pulls me in the other direction. But the failure to write, yeah, that will put me in a foul mood.
Thanks, Sam. Chocolate is the answer to almost everything. Out of the 6 stories I’ve written this year, I’m really only proud of one of them. Two are okay, and the others…well…at least I can say I’ve written six stories. 🙂 I guess a 50/50 mix of publishable/non-publishable stuff is pretty good. And I’ll try to get a sidebar up on the comments. That is annoying.
@Matt, that’s awesome. You usually write lighter stuff, right? I think that helps some. My fiction has been a little on the dark side this year. Hmmm…maybe there’s something to that. (And those baby Ramen noodle things were really good.)
Ahh–sidebar is happy good. 🙂