Friday, March 19, 2010

Writing your way through the doldrums

On my current project, I was suffering from a lack of interest. I'm reworking an old story that didn't have a proper ending...itself an old story for me...and it was no fun. Every day I was thinking about dumping it and working on something else. But every day I did another 500 words of something for it...500 words from some character's point of view, or 500 words trying to fill out a Snowflake for it..something. And it's taken what seems like forever...maybe ten or fifteen days...but I finally feel like I've turned a corner on it. I just kept churning through the bad ideas and now I'm getting some good ones.

Part of the pain was having to view this story, which I'd once thought was hot stuff, as being truly awful. Now I can hardly see what I saw in it. Well, that's not strictly true: the same elements that I liked are there. I just can't any longer see why I ever thought the story was a complete story, or accomplished much. Now I read it and I think, "Nothing happens in this thing!"

Hey, I still might dump it. But I've written my way out of this particular hole and am having a good time again.

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations! Way to keep plugging away.

    I was making great progress on my vision of the Dragon Hunter story, tentatively titled Blood and Dragons (ugh), but then, starting on Tuesday, I volunteered all morning two consecutive mornings, had to get the house clean for guests, had a financial planning course, took the kids to an art night, had March Madness start, and had five house guests.

    But I had time to think about stuff, so this morning I did write a sizable chunk of outline for a possible novel-length expansion of the story, tentatively titled Serpents and Dragons.

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  2. What's the 2nd novel going to be called? :)

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