Hey everyone. Today we're talking about where I am in the middle of writing and editing the projects I'm working on. I call it the dread middle because it seems, whenever I get there, that I'm not sure of the project anymore. I keep on writing, because I'm close to the end, but it's where doubt starts to creep in. Doubt that I'm writing the correct story or that I'm in the right part of the novel or that I'm even supposed to be a writer at all. The last part we'll touch on in a moment, but let's stick with the writing parts for the moment.
I know that I'm not alone in the fact that the middle is where writers get nervous about what they're doing. It happens to a lot of writers and authors - even Neil Gaiman touched upon it in a NaNoWriMo pep letter - so it's not unique to one person. If you're able to get through the middle without dread, I'd love to hear how you do it. So, please, leave comments below or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter about it. But, for the rest of us / me, I can never get through it without some sort of worry. Some sort of wondering if I'm doing the right thing. That's where slug writing comes in. I slow down to the point where I'm moving as fast as a slug, getting in a few words there and a few words here, so it takes me a few days to write a chapter instead of hours.
I wish I had more tips for this other than you just have to get through it. The few words here and there, the few days to write a chapter, is so much better than not doing it at all. It is so much better to get as much as you can on the page until you feel like you can't anymore. We're human - it's my word for 2017 - and we need to realize our limits in order to not stress out more when things are not going our way. So it took me a few days to get through a chapter but the chapter is now done. It's a lot better than where I was before the chapter was done, which was staring at a blank page wondering what the hell I was doing. It is a lot better than having nothing down at all. Even if I have to go back and edit - I do, it's over 4,000 words - but it's done. I'm getting ever so closer to the end and I can write the fun chapter next of being at a gala and surprise.
So, like I always say, it's best to keep on writing. When you are able to do that, then you can come to the next part of the problem, where you wonder if you really can call yourself a writer or an author. Thanks to Elon James White of This Week in Blackness podcast, I've come to know about this as imposter syndrome. It's where you're highly motivated to achieve or have achieved great accomplishments but you're afraid that you're going to be exposed as a fraud and you haven't done all these great things. I am the highly motivated part, as I want to move onto the achieved great things, but I also fear that none of it's going to happen. That everyone is humoring me when they read and say that my plot and characters are great but my grammar sucks.
Yes, that's actually a compliment. Grammar's fixable, plot and characters are a bigger problem. I am worried that when I start to pitch my novels that I'm just going to get laughed at. That it's all been done before and that I will never be published or taken seriously as a writer. That's what comes to me when I reach the middle of my novels and I know it's stupid. I know it's wrong. If I cannot get published through traditional means, there's self publishing. Sure, it's not as grand, but I'll still be an author. I'll still be awesome and I'll be doing what I love to do. It's just the hard part of getting through it and realizing that it'll pass. It passes every time I get out of the middle and goes away until I reach the middle part of my editing. But it'll pass. It always does.
So, that's it for today. Keep on writing. Sometimes it's the only thing that will make everything okay in the end.
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