Is It Time to Call it Quits?

Back in 2011 I wrote this blog post (read it if you wish) about losing my muse. Until I lost my muse, writing was so automatic, so real, the words and scenes and dialogue so vivid, that writing was really very easy for me. Then I lost my muse, and it's never returned. This loss happened just a month or two before I retired from the world of work. The loss of my muse was a terrible loss. Before very long it became apparent that it wasn't coming back, and it hasn't.

Despite that, writing was all I knew. It was still my dream, and I had (still have) much unfinished/unpolished material to work on. For the past three years I've been living off that surplus; yes, I've been living off the past. My short story collection The Gunman in Black was the first original fiction I'd written in three years. I've also written three more stories yet to be published. This appears to have been a temporary burst of creativity, because I've been unable to write anything new since February. In fact, I've been unable to write anything except a few blog posts and entries in my journal . As far as fiction goes, my mind seems to have become completely blank. I fear that my ability to write fiction has died.

The question has been floating around in my mind for a while now. Is it time to call it quits? The thought of trying to write a novel, to spend months and months, possible years, on it, struggling with every sentence, every scene, with all the complexities of creating a novel, seems an impossible task now. Lately, I haven't been able to even grasp the possibility of doing so. It just seems too difficult now. So, is it time to call it quits as a writer?

The desire to write still comes and goes. But it doesn't lead to action. So, I've been trying to accept the reality of my situation. Maybe it is time to call it quits.

On Losing My Muse

I lost my muse about six months ago after suffering a severe bout of depression. Until then I had the ability to see the entire novel, the entire story, in one vision. I could see where changing a word here affected a word fifty pages away. My muse dictated dialogue. Writing was the easiest thing in the world for me to do. It flowed. Yet, when my reading groups read my work, they always found things to fix or improve. And, I have also never been published. Since I've lost my muse, writing is much more difficult, but in some ways I think it's better. When I do manage to write a chapter, or add to a scene, or whatever, it seems much more polished than before. I'm not sure losing my muse has been a totally bad thing. I just have to work harder, but the results seem to be better.