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The Writing Block of Getting Better

ladyfickle

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Have you noticed how one wonderful day you have crafted the Fifth Chapter of your WIP to perfection? However, you feel the First Chapter needs thorough revisiting, if it is ever going to compete with the Fifth Chapter or even remain in the same draft. So you focus on it. You spend hours on it, even days, rearranging, untroducing dialogue and other good things until the chapter looks really polished. Then you read the Fifth Chapter again and it turns out it needs editing if it will ever deserve to be in the same story as the First Chapter. This is a serious problem for me...it keeps me working on the First and the Fifth chapter and everything else in my first draft is getting more and more hopeless. Very bad for motivation! Has that happened to anyone?
 

lizmonster

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This was my method for years, and I'd eventually get tired of the story and start something new. I never finished anything. (Well, there was that bit of fanfic in the early 90s, but we won't talk about that. :))

What broke my streak was NaNoWriMo. I had to barrel forward without revising anything, no matter how many plot points I was changing. I'd find myself starting a new chapter assuming events I hadn't revised into the earlier chapters yet. It was really, really stressful.

I've completed 6 books this way.

I will also say although here on the boards I know writers who share my process, I know plenty of writers in real life who have completely different methodologies. Your issue sounds a lot like mine, though, and I don't think it's uncommon. Essentially, I confronted the habit that was keeping me from completing a draft, and I stopped doing it. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. :)
 

InkFinger

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I had to learn to push through to completion and then go back to fix in drafting. Learning to finish is huge. It's much easier to work on something that exists than it is to fix something that only exists in my imagination.

Lizmonster is a good person to listen to.
 

Ari Meermans

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Yep, what Liz and InkFinger said. For many of us—even those like me who are constantly tweaking as we go along—revising all or part of the first chapter once the ending is in place will almost always make the beginning of the story stronger. So forget about the first chapter for now and plow on through to the end, then go back to the first chapter to analyze it with your written ending in mind.
 

Introversion

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I’m an infamous procrastinator, I think mostly because I never have faith in myself at the start. Once I’m hip-deep, I’ve got no time to worry, I just do it. It’s the starting part that’s hard for me. Faced with a large house project, I eventually learned to do a few “change a burned out lightbulb” projects first. Boosts my confidence, is quick, feels good, etc.

A few years ago, I recognized that each time I approach writing, it feels the same. Even a story I’ve been working on — every new day I sit down with it, feels like tiling a wall for the first time, or laying down hardwood floors, etc.

I also recognize that I could cheerfully iterate on the same ten paragraphs for a year. :tongue I like editing!

So I adapted my changing-lightbulbs coping mechanism in a way that feeds my editing fetish: I start each writing session by rereading some earlier scene, and editing where I see how to improve it. But I don’t allow myself to do it for more than 15 minutes. By then, my writerly muscles are warmed up and I feel competent to apply them to new words.

Just a thought, dunno if it would help you.
 
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Woollybear

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Along these lines, chapter fifteen on this project is utter manure, despite the fact that it was acceptable on draft #3 a month ago.

The other thing that happens is the voice of the narrative drifts, like I start in C major and end up in G flat then warble back toward D.
 

ChaseJxyz

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Perfect is the enemy of done (or good). If you're focusing on getting chapter one perfect, then you're not writing chapter 6. Have a notebook or seperate Word document where you have a running list of stuff to get to in editing. Once you have the whole first draft, you can then look at your story as a whole and then get chapter 1 to fit that better. If you make it perfect now, something down the line with the plot or a character might change and then all that work will be for naught. Worker smarter, not harder :)
 

starrystorm

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Chapters become perfect at different times. Heck, right before I self-published my book, I had to completely re-write a chapter. Sent it quickly to my editor who reviewed it, sent it back, and then I made the changes (plus a few others).

Who knows? By the time you finish your third draft you might not even need chapter five.

Just relax and move on.

Currently I'm re-writing my second draft with the knowledge that my first chapter needs to be completely scrapped and changed because I decided around the fourth chapter to cut out a very important character. Currently finished chapter 9, but am ignoring the thoughts that I should start on chapter one now.

Hope this helps. :)

Editing to add that nothing's going to feel perfect.
 
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TeresaRose

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Even big-name successful authors have wanted to change parts in their books, AFTER they were published!:Shrug:
 

ladyfickle

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Thanks to everyone for the time you've taken to answer my question.
Probably I didn't make it clear - I have a finished first draft - I just don't like it a lot.
But I enjoyed reading about your writing and editing processes and your advice. Thanks for the greatest generosity - attention.
 

Lakey

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Hello ladyfickle. I know what you are talking about! The thing that gives me hope for myself as a writer is that I love revision—I love it more than drafting new material. Writing new stuff is painful for me; excruciatingly slow, with product that is almost always excruciatingly awful. But it gives me material to work with on revision. So I revise, and revise, and revise and revise and revise.

For short stories, that means often going through the story as a whole eight times or more; certain parts even more than that. My experience with short stories is that they get worse before they get better, or rather, I feel worse about them before I start to see the polish emerge. I get more and more frustrated as the story fails to do what I want it to do, as write new bits that don’t fix the problem or that make it worse; as I rearrange things and have to throw away parts I liked to make the new structure work. Eventually, though, I pull some lever and suddenly the thing falls into place, and I’m no longer writing new material or rearranging—only making sentence-level edits. And that is incredibly satisfying.

With novels, well, I am still at work on my first one, and it’s been four years. Some parts of it I’m relatively pleased with and have shown to critique partners; others are not fit for human consumption and ought to be killed with fire and then buried in a swamp. I’m in the midst of a major push through the whole manuscript right now—and I’m in something like the state you’re describing. The parts that are not bad get a little better, while the parts that are terrible get scrapped and rewritten from the ground up. And what does that leave me with? Some parts are pretty polished; others, for all of that work, are still in that poor first-draft state. It’s maddening!

I think, though, that the quality of the whole is better for all this work. I know that I will have to do this entire process again, and probably again after that to get the novel anywhere close to where I want it to be, not to mention all the sentence-level stuff that will have to come once the bones of the thing are in place. It is, if you’ll pardon the inelegant word choice, a shit-ton of work. A lot of it is painful, and a lot of it is on material that may never be seen by another human. But I tell myself that it is all making me a better writer, and making the final product better, even the stuff that comes out terrible and gets scrapped before it even gets typed into the manuscript.

TL;DR, the best thing about revision is that when it works, it’s so deeply satisfying—to see this grotesque lump of clay with little bits of rock and hair stuck in it slowly take shape under my tenacious effort, to begin to look like the thing I had in my head when I started, to start to take on a little sheen of polish, to finally become something I’m willing to show to someone else and say “look what I made.” Truthfully—the pleasure of that experience is what keeps me writing.

:e2coffee:
 
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ladyfickle

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Dear Lakey,


Funny thing is that revision had never happened to me until recently. I enjoyed my first draft so well, that I self-published it. Then one day later my sister proposed a marketing strategy, and I decided to look at the book and see if anything can be improved before I launched the strategy. First I prepared a cover. Then I got a lot of criticism from close family members and I started working. It turned out that my perfect draft can be much better, I was startled how much better it could become. And then I stopped the book sales, and focused on bettering the work. Then I got into this movie...
To be honest, I am in the process of discovering reviewing. I think I like it for exactly the same reasons you like it - I feel like a sculptor with a piece of clay. Only it can be as scary as the empty page, especially when you have to throw all your favorite stuff that you thought was so cool, but suddenly no longer works. It's alive! The story has got an opinion of its own as well, the characters got their own lives and that is pushing you in different directions. It's like when I paint something - I keep painting until I like the result...picture over picture, chapter over chapter until it makes ME happy. And even then some people are not happy with your result and that is also something you need to cope with...