Don’t Over-Chew That Steak, Sweetheart
Watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons while thinking about the Friday writing post is probably not good for me. I’m just sayin’.
I am now in that part of the novel–a quarter to a third through, basically–where I realize I have been wrong for 20-odd thousand words and now I know the real way everything should go. This feeling is deep and panic-laden, and it is the bane of many a good writer.
The seduction, of course, is to go back over what you’ve written and rewrite it according to the New Shiny Idea. This is all very well, but it doesn’t get one any further toward the finish line.
My solution is to just start at that point, assume that I can fix the front end of the book later, and write the rest of the story according to the New Shiny Idea. A zero draft does not have to be perfect, and it’s a lot easier to go back and tweak the initial 20K than it is to rewrite the first 20K five times and then get discouraged and toss the whole work, which usually ends up happening.
Constantly reworking the front of your novel according to the New Shiny Idea is 98% of the time an avoidance tactic dressed up as something you could conceivably think is good writing habit. It feels like you’re making progress, you end up writing 70-100K or so, but you do not have a finished work to show for it. You have an overchewed piece of steak. It is a trick to keep you from finishing, because finishing is scary.
Finishing is scary because it is only the first step in submitting, getting rejected or published, etc. It represents a whole new set of problems, chief among them is the ever-famous Internal Censor screaming you finished this and it’s still a piece of crap! Who told you that you could do this!
I can’t say it often enough. Do yourself a favor and get the whole corpse up on the table before you start operating on it, trimming and tweaking and making it pretty enough to bury. (Hey, all metaphors break down sooner or later. So sue me.) Do not worry if you get a great idea of blinding flash of light a third or a quarter or half of the way there. Incorporate that idea at the point you get it, and keep forging ahead.
Believe me, you will revise a finished work often enough to get sick of it, and enough times to fully meld that shiny idea seamlessly with the beginning.
Just don’t obsessively rework the front end of the story. Of all the avoidance behaviors new (and even experienced) writers display, this is one of the worst and most seductive because it feels like you’re doing actual work when you’re really…not.
It’s hard just to keep on keepin’ on. Believe me. I am right now trying my damndest not to go back and fiddle with a few important things that ABSOLUTELY MUST go in the front of the story–but if they ABSOLUTELY MUST, I will catch them in revision. So will my beta, and my editor, and my agent. There will be no shortage of opportunities to shoehorn. Right now, though, my job is to get this whole thing out of my head and onto the page.
Time to get back to work.
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November 17th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
thank you for posting this
…i am struggling with my first attempt at NaNo. every book i have tried to write – i end up where i am now – listening to myself saying i need to redo it or just stop cause i am not good enough, its not good enough.