I think the main reason for my obstacles is that my mind has been functioning with a definitive focus for so long. My career, my hobbies, and work in and around IT systems allow for very little room for freedom. It either is or it isn't and the path to the goal is very limited. There are rules and you must follow those rules. Writing fiction there are no rules per se. There is no right or wrong way to plan a story, there is no right or wrong way to create a character, there is no right or wrong way to events in your created universe. The rules are whatever you make them to be when creating.
This is what I need to break out of and I am starting to do that. It's a fight with my analytic, planning oriented mind. A mind built from a career where I don't start building something unless I know exactly how it's going to look at the end and precisely all the steps I am going to get there. I have a novel idea in mind that I have been planning for years. Plot points, flows, characters, working it all out on sketches and in my head without a single sentence written. Always thinking that I cannot start writing until I have the full plan down. This is not working, I'll never start. After I shelved it and been writing short stories with nothing more than a loose idea has been therapeutic. The end results have been, in my opinion, more complete stories than what I was planning. Needs for a new character pop up, new settings, dialogue, action, and flows change as the mind releases without the limitation of 'rules'.
Maybe that's why it's called creative writing and not structured writing.
Like anything to each his own, what works for you may not work for someone else.
Time to turn the page...
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