One piece of advice I’ve seen is to write constantly. Another piece of advice I’ve seen is to just get it all out on the page and not worry about how it turns out, to fix it in the editing stage.
Except, I can’t help but go back and overthink it. If I write a section or piece, I’m constantly revising as I go along, reworking a sentence or scene or even the word choice as I write. Most recently, I had put myself to a challenge to write 500 words a day (I’ve already failed). I wrote a scene for a story I’d like to work on, but then next day I looked it over and didn’t like it. So I deleted it, and then thought some about what to do instead, and then didn’t write anything more than that.
I have seen a lot of people recommend waiting a longer time between writing and editing.
It’s difficult to see something objectively if you never separate yourself from it.
So, in the old days, writers would write something out, put it in a drawer for months or years, and look at it later. Stephen King mentions this in his book On Writing, for example.
This is the way to do it. First drafts are supposed to kind of suck and that’s ok. You can fix to later move on.
write something out, put it in a drawer for months or years, and look at it later. Stephen King mentions this in his book On Writing, for example.
I really don’t believe that mister ‘book a year, every year, for decades and decades’ is letting manuscript sit in drawers for months and years… Not that it isn’t good advice … I just doubt that he’s personally following his own advice.
I have published a couple books. The most efficient method for me has been get to the next part and come back to the displeasing part later, in the editing phase. The most important is to get the scenario going. The rest is just form. Form can be edited later.
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I think this is a normal part of writing, at least it is for me. I write, delete, and rewrite not only sentences, scenes, and chapters, but entire stories. Or, I don’t. I have many more stories I’ve started and abandoned, than completed. But, I still enjoyed writing them.
The important thing is you enjoy the process, that it’s not stressful for you, it’s supposed to be fun. Unless it’s your paying job, you don’t need to complete what you start, and it doesn’t need to be perfect, or even good--this is allowed. I think if you give yourself permission to be imperfect, or even to give up, then you’ll find that you can move forward in a story and complete it. Keep telling yourself, when you’re tempted to go back again and again, that it doesn’t need to be perfect, it can be just good enough this time. Set the goal of completion, not perfection. Maybe instead of setting a number of words per day, set a deadline for completion, something reasonable, that will spur you to keep going.
The last book I wrote sat for over a year without an ending, because I had written toward a particular ending, and when I got there, I didn’t like the ending anymore. I couldn’t come up with a new ending that wouldn’t require rewriting most of the book, so I just let it sit.
I’d be out for a walk and come up with something I thought might work, so I’d go home and take a stab at it. By “take a stab at it”, I mean that I’d need to skim-read the whole book to make sure the idea would work, because I’d forgotten the details of the plot. Usually, the new idea would not work, so I’d leave it alone for weeks or months more. I did that a few times before I finally figured it out. Too well, as it turned out. I came up with two endings I loved, that both also worked. So, I said, “fuck it”, and wrote them both. Now, the book has two endings, and I don’t care. I like it, and that’s all that matters to me. It’s too long, it’s repetitive, and it has two endings, but I refuse to change it. Last time I looked no one had commented that they’d read it all the way through, and that’s fine.
Not that I have the discipline to keep writing constantly at all. But even if I could do that, I restrain myself from working on a very specific spot too long. When you face that boomerang editing period, I think it’s time to take a break from that section/piece and to become (somewhat) a stranger to your work again.
I don’t follow the advice directly and instead my goal is to not let my thoughts rot in my brain. Furthermore I try to have a healthy amount of parallel projects and naturally when it’s time to turn away from project A, I let my rising motivation for another project take over. Not that I have the discipline to maintain a healthy balance between my parallel projects…
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If I’m being paid to write it, I’ll see if the customer likes how it turned out. If so, publish it and move the fuck on.
If I’m writing it for my own benefit and I don’t like how it turned out … then I go back and edit it or completely rewrite it until I do like how it turned out. Writing is rewriting.
One piece of advice I’ve seen is to write constantly. Another piece of advice I’ve seen is to just get it all out on the page and not worry about how it turns out, to fix it in the editing stage
If you’re trying to take this advice then don’t think of it as always something you’ll directly use. The point is the process. You get better by doing. The chapter you write in the near future will be better even if it contained nothing you wrote in these exercises in the months before.
