Restricting, to be honest.
It’s frustrating to have thoughts, feelings, and ideas; but the inability to communicate them as effectively as I’d like. I liken it to the perpetual imbalance between inspiration and motivation which is so common in creative people. Every time you have an idea, you can’t find it in yourself to push through and get it done; but every time you want to put work on a page you have no idea what to do.
Writing feels like a layered process, similar to code. You have the heavily detailed low-level decisions, alongside high-level architectural decisions.
You do the high-level stuff wrong: everything you write is poorly conceived. It’s just a bad idea, the recovery process is brutal.
You do the low-level stuff wrong: your end product just sucks. You can recover from this but it’s still no fun, and it makes you feel like a rookie.
There’s also the mid-level stuff. In code I’d consider this to be the code blocks themselves, and the location of the boundaries between different actions. Do you read in, perform some operation, and export all in one function? Are all three parts separate? Can you adequately justify your decision?
...unfortunately I’m not good enough at analogies to keep this up very far, but I’d say the low-level decisions are bugging me the most.
I’m also pretty much incapable of debugging writing. Perhaps I need to try something like Vale to lint what I write.
NaBloPoMo has revealed a strange challenge. I have to do something which I’m not spectacular at, every single day, with only a day to complete it. Then I have to publish it where anyone could see it. It’s kinda stressful.
What am I going to do about it?
Write.