Information Overload and Research - The Killer!
This is, I am sure, a very common problem. You can be researching a career for one of your characters, with your morning cup of tea, and before you know it, you are still in your pyjamas and it is getting dark outside! Where do the hours go? This isn't an easy problem to overcome and can lead to such a feeling of restlessness by the end of the day and a feeling of total dissatisfaction with your day. The dissatisfaction sets you on this never ending cycle of feeling pressured to write when you don't want to, especially as you have been sitting in front of the pc all day. That is when you are most likely to form a mental block on writing anything creative. There is so much information out there, that it really could take over your life if you let it!
To overcome this, I would suggest laying down some guidelines before you even turn your pc on. Write down exactly what it is you need to find out, the depth you need to go to and know where to stop. There are a lot of sites out there which are helpful but recognise when they are saying the same things, make sure you are not wading through the same information time and time again. Don't keep printing out pages of research - have a document ready with the information you need outlined and space to fill in the gaps. Once you have filled in the gaps make sure you don't keep going. Use what you have and if at a later point in your writing you find out there are bits missing, do another outline with gaps and fill in again until you have all of the information you need without having spent an unstructured day (or days) on it.
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