Fighting the funnel effect 
Lately, I’ve been having a bit of trouble writing. It’s not writer’s block so much as something that I call the funnel effect. I have a lot of ideas spinning around in my head. But when I try to get them down — even as outlines — it’s as if those ideas are being poured into a funnel. Everything goes into the top quickly, but comes out slowly at the narrow end. Far too slowly for my liking.
The result: my writing has slowed down. Not just articles, but also queries and blog entries. Its frustrating to say the least. As always, though, I’m sure that this problem will vanish in a few days. But that thought doesn’t make things easier.
Do you ever run into a problem like this? If so, how do you deal with it? Leave a comment.
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You’ve pretty much defined writing as I see it. I always have a head full of things from which I can draw. Quite often the things in my head have litter or nothing to do with what I’m writing but that’s life. When I analyse a piece of writing it’s often amazing where all the ideas have come from, some will be things I’ve watched on TV that day, a snippet of a conversation or something that happened in the dim and distant path. That’s the thing about the funnel, everything gets mixed up in there, and, like you, the gestation period often takes longer than I’d like.
My solution has always been to work with what’s dribbling out at the time – go with the flow, literally. So, I hardly touched my novel last month but I wrote a couple of short stories and about a dozen pretty decent poems. They weren’t on the agenda but who’s complaining – I’m writing and that’s all that matters. If I had an editor breathing down my neck and deadlines to meet that would be another matter but I haven’t, at least not for the fiction; I have enough blogs written to keep me going for a month so, as soon as I get an idea where I need to go next on the book, I can drop everything and get to it.