Background artiste from 'Better than Stars'

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Working Through the Block

Well, not exactly a block. I've been stuck for days - *blushes* more like weeks - on the same sequence I'm trying to add into the rewrite of Stars. I thought I was finding it difficult because I lacked the excitement of creating new work - or maybe I was missing the pressure of a deadline (see How Do You Keep Going When Nobody Cares? below) - or possibly just being lazy.

All those things are probably true, but what I've now realised is that I was mostly finding it tough because the passage was wrong from the start. It wasn't working, and I needed to approach it completely differently. Somewhere inside I knew that all along.

As soon as I saw that, I was able to rewrite most of it at a sitting. Now I'm poised to move on. Yay!

The question is, was it a waste of time crawling more and more slowly up that blind alley, or did I need to do it in order to see the right path? Far from being redundant, was it actually necessary?

One thing I'm sure of: if you stick at it, you never stop learning.

No comments: