The shifty, useless time

These days, my writing time consists of staring into space and occasionally jotting notes by hand into a notebook. The notes range from ideas to questions to myself to answers to those questions. Every now and then, I'll cross one thing out or underline another and annotate it as "good" or "could be!", but that's about as exciting as it gets. I have nothing productive to show for the time. I don't feel like I'm writing. I feel like I'm wasting time.

I keep going only because intellectually I also understand that this is how the process works for me. If I don't invest this time, I won't do good work.

Just as importantly, the time I'm sitting and taking notes and doing nothing but thinking about the novel really is just the small visible part of the writing iceberg. All during the day, my subconscious churns on the story, and at random moments new insights appear.

I hate this time, and it's likely to continue for at least a few more weeks. I also don't know a way around it.

Eventually, I'll have enough notions that I can handwrite a rough outline, and then after more days of work, I'll be ready to start typing up a significantly longer (typically over 7K words) outline. When I finish that, when I finally write the first sentence of the book, then I'll feel like a writer again.