That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days.

Friends challenged me to a 50K write off, with good intentions. The bad part? I haven’t a clue what I’m doing. So I sit down and I write, one line, one paragraph after another and hope that in some small corner of reality, it will all make sense when I reach the end of the story.

So right now, I’m writing for the sake of writing. I’m a proven pantser. I don’t plot out anything. I usually start with a plot, a conflict and characters. As a friend pointed out, my characters show up with a Driver’s License. I don’t get much more than that to write them. This time around, I think the licenses were ALL I got. I didn’t get the plot, the conflict took roughly forty pages to give me a clue and it’s been very slow to coalese for me. The plot… Oh, yeah, that thing again. It’s been very murky since the word go. I think I know what’s going on at this point, but I haven’t a clue of who the antagonist is, if it’s the guy at the beginning of the story, someone further down the priority pole or what…

What does all of this mean? Well, the lack of the above is why the friends I have (hey, I can envision dart boards with their pictures on them) challenged me. I’ve been letting the lack of the essentials keep me from writing. I haven’t written anything worthwhile in months. Nothing of length in close to if not a year. That’s a long dry spell to not be writing. I’ve dabbled and finished stuff that really should just be rewritten, but breaking out that crusty imagination and actually using it from scratch? Yeah, that hasn’t been happening.

The good side to this is I think it’s actually working. I’ve been writing for four days straight. If you knew my record, that would shock you too. It’s shocked me. I can see huge rewrites in my future because even with the story plot developing as I write it, I don’t have more. Very little character information, very little exposition to create their world. Heck, I don’t even know what city they are in, or the heroine’s job! Eek! Soo….. I’m writing for the sake of writing, because you can’t edit a blank page.

The purpose of this? To break my block. I knew I had one. I can think of dozens of reasons not to write, but if I’m not writing then what AM I doing?

Yeah, I said the same thing.

I should end this with an auspicious question, but I honestly don’t have one, so if you’re a writer, feel free to tell me what you do with your characters, with writer’s block, with writing, how you see your characters, just whatever flips your switch. From the readers, tell what you enjoy about reading, the escape, the world you can be sucked into, just what makes your day when you get a good read.