What's On Your Mind About Your Writing?

Sam Argent said:

Will any part of writing make me feel like a rational person?

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No. Just give up on that and move on.

AshleyEpidemic said:

I am paranoid about starting to write my next novel tomorrow. Generally I have everything solidly plotted out. I follow the outline. This time, I have the beginning set up and the end set up, but a lot of the middle is missing. I'm nervous I am going to botch the project since I don't have a full outline for support. I am terrified of winging it and having to spend hours upon hours fixing the crap I added in because I wasn't sure where I was going.

Dear Lord, I hope this comes out well. If not, I'll be doing a lot of crying later on.

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Aha! You are going to try my method: A beginning, an end, and some middle ideas. Let me know how that works out for ya.

The thing I'm thinking about most right now is my query letter. I have like, four different versions, all with different amounts of information revealed. I can't figure out how much I should give away, and how much I should leave out. It's so stressful. I swear I fall asleep and wake up thinking about my query.

Thinking my story needs a few more developments to make proper sense.

SpinningWheel said:

IKWYM. I picked up a Philippa Gregory last night that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, because it's fashionable to slag off PG at the moment because the new BBC adaptation of The White Queen is so terrible, and after a few pages I thought, 'I wish I could write like that.'

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blacbird said:

Please, Jesus, help me to write as well as Stephanie Meyer has done. I just am not capable of doing that.

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Some wise denizen of the water cooler once sagely pointed out this sentiment:
You are never going to write like Philippa Grepory or Stephanie Meyer, because you're not them. Nor should you strive to be.
You're goal as a writer is to be the best YOU you can be.

Spinning, having recently read a piece of your work on SYW, rest assured, your writing doesn't suck.

(blacbird - I may have read something of yours, but it's not fresh in my mind, so don't take this to mean that your writing isn't any good!)

I was surprised at how much some very simple research changed the nature of my story. I just looked up a picture of a library I'd gone to regularly when I'd grown up -- and the city had torn it down and replaced it with an ugly "green" building.

Finally managed to break my first experience of "writers block". Hurrah. Very glad I managed to build up a lot of buffer chapters though, I'm going to be paranoid about keeping ahead now.

Working my way through / back into my WIP after a horribly long gap - let's just say a baby was involved.

Thinking that I really want to get this thing written.

Thinking that, if I can manage to pull it off when I'm far and away the busiest, the most exhausted I've ever been - the baby is still involved, and the aftermath of a horrid pregnancy, but there's also the small matter of a big old house I pretty much pulled apart before the baby, and now have to put back together sufficiently before winter, or said baby will be a little chilly - if I can do it (and do it well) under these circumstances, then maybe I am a writer after all.

fiendish said:

Working my way through / back into my WIP after a horribly long gap - let's just say a baby was involved.

Thinking that I really want to get this thing written.

Thinking that, if I can manage to pull it off when I'm far and away the busiest, the most exhausted I've ever been - the baby is still involved, and the aftermath of a horrid pregnancy, but there's also the small matter of a big old house I pretty much pulled apart before the baby, and now have to put back together sufficiently before winter, or said baby will be a little chilly - if I can do it (and do it well) under these circumstances, then maybe I am a writer after all.

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Good luck, Fiendish. I wrote a draft on maternity leave with my second, and he really didn't sleep so I'm not quite sure how I managed it. I think the long periods of forced inactivity while feeding when your mind just wanders can be helpful to the imagination.
It's amazing what can be done, but don't beat yourself up if you don't.

Got 790 words down of my new wip, some of it is the beginning, the rest is some scene that'll take place further into the story. That future scene was something I knew I was going to write eventually, but it formed more clearly last night while I was in the shower, in particular the dialogue. Always figures, bits of my stories come to me when it's at my most inconvenient to write it down. So I hurried with my shower and got to my computer and got to typing before I lost it. I still didn't manage to get it all down as I imagined it exactly, but I rarely do.

SpinningWheel said:

It's amazing what can be done, but don't beat yourself up if you don't.

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Good advice.

Started my naughty SF story, then overwhelmed myself with internet research. Thirty-nine years without wearing makeup and now it's essential to know what shade of eyeliner a woman ought to wear.

*headdesk*

I'm in the midst of 3 supernatural noir novellas (1950's California) - the first with the copy editor, second as first draught, third in outline. Everything I've had published (in a very minor way) has been set in the US/Canada or a non-specific English-speaking environment. Hell, I even have a Western WIP that has attracted favourable comments.

What should be home field advantage (urban UK) just falls flat. I have a UF novel set in London and the only publisher to show interest was in the US.

Sorry for this minor rant but I just received a rejection postcard after 8 months of 'black box' waiting (no comment on the submission process). I don't usually mind rejections but this one has irked me for some reason...

I never thought describing "hell" would be such a complicated thought process. My brain is frazzled.

I need to figure out the plot of the first book in my series, but my mind wants to spend its time thinking about the plot of the final book in the series. It's good to know that stuff, but I don't need to know all of it to get through the first book's plot.

Fell into the trap of comparing myself to someone amazing...been half a basket case all day.

impossiblewords said:

I never thought describing "hell" would be such a complicated thought process. My brain is frazzled.

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Just liken it to the current pain you're going through. Heh, heh.

tri

Yesterday evening I sat down and read a novel I wrote in 2012 and then fixed until Spring 2013. It turned out to rock. It turned out to have exactly the style which I love reading.

Such a relief to see this. Before I either saw everything through editing eyes or through 'I suck' eyes. But now, after many months, I finally managed to see it simply as a reader, who sees what 'the author' is doing and thinks its damn good. It was a super feeling.

What I read was like an almost stable mix of Graham Masterton circa 1979, Michael Moorcock circa 1968, and Robert McCammon circa 1983. I was like "I wrote this?" "I actually wrote this??"

Then, of course, stirred the shadow under the grin: what if I can never write like this again? What if this was a fluke? Or what if I can write like this, but will always need two years for one novel from now on?

Haha. Well, back to the current projects. Time will tell

My computer crashes every 15 minutes or so. Good thing I'm in a middle of a good old-fashioned longhand rewrite, or that'd be even more annoying than it is.

Being a writer seems to be an endless run through every form of self-sabotage I can possibly find, but I think I've finally given in to the idea that there's nothing wrong with concentrating on editing and rewriting a single project.

rwm4768 said:

I need to figure out the plot of the first book in my series, but my mind wants to spend its time thinking about the plot of the final book in the series. It's good to know that stuff, but I don't need to know all of it to get through the first book's plot.

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My brain does this too. WTH? While I was finishing my WIP (first book in the trilogy) I took some time off to daydream about the ending, but all I got was "Wouldn't it be cool if such-and-such happened in the middle of the third book?" and proceeded to take two pages of notes about a frickin tsunami. I appreciated the inspiration, but the timing could have been a little better.

Atalanta said:

Started my naughty SF story, then overwhelmed myself with internet research. Thirty-nine years without wearing makeup and now it's essential to know what shade of eyeliner a woman ought to wear.

*headdesk*

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LOL
When you find out let me know. Maybe sometime in my next 52 years I'll need to start wearing some

katci13 said:

Fell into the trap of comparing myself to someone amazing...been half a basket case all day.

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HUGS

Atalanta said:

and proceeded to take two pages of notes about a frickin tsunami.

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Who of us living in Oregon doesn't think of tsunamis? I always leave my car running while eating at Mo's on the coast.

I went through my browser cache at work, at home, and on my phone to tally up how many times I refreshed my Goodreads dashboard to see if I had yet received my first non-relative, non-friend review.

Total dashboard visits for 1 day: 196

That's not counting other sites, like Amazon or some review blogs. The tally wouldn't be so bad if this were day one or two, but I've apparently been doing that for a month. Maybe tomorrow will be the day. I've a lot of review copies out there -- it has to happen someday. I'd better go check.

Craig

I need to finish this scene I'm working on. It's been difficult to focus on it, and I'm ready to move on from there.

I finally have most of my plot outline written. I just need to figure out the mechanics of the climax.

Then it's on to the rest of the series.