Thoughts from a distant shed.

After some fits and starts in the last week , I made a concentrated effort over the weekend to get my head back in the game and start writing. I wasn’t suffering from “writer’s block” or anything like that - the problem was simply that I’d been away from it for over a month and hadn’t really looked at my current project in that time – this meant that when I came back to it, my head was no longer “in” the story.  It’s a lot like where you’re reading a book and stop, then come back months later – the book and characters feel unfamiliar, you’ve forgotten details the characters are referring to and can’t get into it. Sometimes you never finish.

Something similar happened to me when I read the brilliant “5^th Wave” by Rick Yancey.  I loved the book, but when the sequel came out, I found it really hard to get into because it had been so long since I’d read the first one (I tend to come to book trilogies late and read them one after another and this is why.)   So I went back and did a cursory read of the first book again, reminded myself who the characters were, why they mattered and what their relationship to one another was.  Then I happily read and enjoyed the sequel (The Infinite Sea) and I’m looking forward to number 3.

As it is with reading, so it is with writing. When you’ve taken a break, sometimes you’re better off going back to the beginning and reading what you’ve already done to refresh your memory before trying to write anything else.  So that’s what I did.  

Now since this was a first draft, I tried to ignore the multitude of things I wanted to change (though I filed them away in the back of my mind for the second draft) – one of the main ways I’ve discovered to keep my word count going up is NOT to edit as I go. It kills the perfectionist in me, but it keeps the words flowing.  As Ernest Hemingway once observed “the first draft of everything is shit.” Well I like to think it isn’t completely shit, but it’s still light years away from being a publishable or even readable quality; full of plot holes, un-fleshed out characters and quite a bit more “tell” than “show” – things I deal with in the edit.  But despite all the shortcomings, I got to a point where I was “feeling” the book again and could continue with the next part of the story.  In the last couple of days, I’ve written 3000 words and I also know where the next few nights of writing are taking me, so that, my friends is progress.

I’ve also sent what I’ve written so far to a trusted friend, a published, award winning writer to take a first look at it so far.  What I need from her is brutal honesty – is the story likely to work?  What isn’t working?  Where are the plot holes? Which characters are jumping off the page and which look like cardboard cutouts?  At the end of the day, while I want to finish the book, I don’t want to spend months and months flogging a dead horse – however painful it would be to bin several months worth of work, it would be more painful to have to bin it after a year or eighteen months.  So I’m more than a little bit nervous, but we’ll wait and see on that and in the meantime, I’ll keep on writing.  TTFN