Paralyzed by an Abundant of Ideas

Creative writers like myself will draw inspiration from practically anything. It could be rooted in a real-life interaction, in an article we read, in the tone of a TV show we are bingeing. Each idea extracted will be filed away in the giant cloud of our minds. The better ideas will take root and will hopefully appear in our chosen medium.

I like to call this my Season of Absorbing. A time where I gather all sorts of muses to get ready to write. I finished my causal writing regimen a month ago, and I haven’t done any sort of writing since it finished. Then again, today I finished my third book this month, so there’s that.

So I’ve got a handful of ideas I think might be worth exploring - some ideas more developed than others – and my fingers are itching to return to storytelling, but I can’t get myself to face that blank Word document.

Does anyone else ever have this problem?

Where you’re not short of ideas, but since there are too many of them, you can’t pick one, so you sit there, paralyzed, feeling a bit overwhelmed? And even though you know that you should just choose a story idea and write it for a little bit to understand the plot and characters better, you make excuses on why the story itself is not so good after all or that you need to actually figure the conflict out, so why bother?

I see it almost like the opposite of Writer’s Block. Reverse Writer’s Block?* I feel like there must be a term out there in the writing world about this phenomenon, but I personally don’t know what it is.

Maybe that’s why strict writing schedule work so well for me. If I force myself to write a certain number of words per day, I don’t have time to think too hard about my story ideas. I’m usually more concerned about getting those words onto the paper so I can move on with my day.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve also been thinking about non-fiction lately. I never studied this form while I was in college, so I’m not entirely confident if I can construct a well-written piece. (They implemented the program the semester after I graduated.) I just read them as they appear on the websites of the literary magazines I keep an eye on.

All in all, I’m in the mood to write, I have the inspirations germinating in my head, but I can’t seem to persuade myself to actually write.

Being a writer of anything is not easy, you guys.




*Nope. Through quick research, I discovered that this describes “hypergraphia.” It’s when a person can’t stop writing. Studies suggest that a malfunction in the temporal lobe of the brain – which governs emotion and possibly inspiration – can result in the compulsive urge to write. Fascinating. But it’s not what I’m experiencing.