charles barrow's writing

  Are we still in lockdown? I know that people in some parts of the country are back in lockdown, but here in the south, where I live, we aren't (technically) though many of our freedoms are still curtailed, or re-curtailed (if that's even a word), so it certainly feels as though I'm still living in the shadow of it. Maybe I'll have to find a new word to use in my headings that better sums the up the new reality of where we are. Anyway, the thrust of this post is intended to be about the learning that I've done over the past few months as a way of reminding myself that I haven't just been resting on my laurels, or wallowing in self pity on a full-time basis. I've not been standing still, there has been forward motion, albeit at a stately pace. I've completed two on-line writing courses over the summer. The first was about memoir writing, and I did it through the DailyOm website. I have no intention of writing my memoirs, but it looked like a really inter...

I've lost my way a little recently, with my writing I mean. I finished my last writing project, John Mann - At Day's End, and published it over 18 months ago, and I've struggled to find a project to focus on since then. I've had plenty of story ideas, and that's probably the problem, I've had too many ideas. It seems like a good problem to have in many ways, too many ideas, but a problem is a problem no matter how it presents itself. I've followed each of those ideas for a distance, a period of time, be it a matter of hours, days or weeks. I've outlined the whole story of one, written a couple of chapters of another, noted detailed dialogue from a scene for a different one altogether. I'm a bit like a dog whose attention keeps getting sidetracked from the stick, to a scent, to a butterfly, to the ball. I focus intently, for a time, and then something else catches my attention and I move on. Is this a personality disorder, a form of writer's block...

I'd been giving myself a lot of grief lately, because I'd not been working on my current writing project (WIP = work in progress). I just couldn't settle down to it. The weird conundrum of lockdown is that I suddenly have acres of spare time but no drive or energy to do anything much with it. And that time has been passing, those days have been racking up into months, and my WIP hasn't gotten any fatter (unlike yours truly). But, what I'd been forgetting is that I have been working on drabbles, in a different notebook, all this time. Everyday, in fact, I work on the latest, like some people might work on the daily crossword. I do think of them as a form of puzzle to be solved...'write a story, in exactly 100 words.' They are tricky things to get right, using the exact right words (as I've said here before) and I enjoy the challenge. Anyway, what I've only just realised is that these ultra short stories I've been working on are directly related to...