Last night I stayed home and had an alone night-in with some Nachos (I do this thing where I bake Mountain Bread wraps into little chips so that I can almost pretend that it’s good for me and it’s actually really fucking amazing. You guys should all come over for nachos some time!)
Oh god yes… (Image via Cubicle Crunch)
I gorged on said nachos, hugged my cat, watched an episode of Girls, then sat down at my computer to do what I like to call ‘some writes’ (because I am a lame-ass who thinks it’s hilarious to talk as if I have little to no grasp of proper grammar.) Anyway, even though I had all this free time and I was ‘feeling it’ and I had some vague idea of the part of the story I wanted to tell, I got sweet fuck all done.
Seriously. I got out maybe 500 words. And that is being extremely generous. So, what is it that holds me up? Why do I go in with all these good intentions and come out with five hundred words?
Click, click, click… (Image from here)
Well, one factor is that I get so caught up in figuring out all the little whys and hows. My characters can’t just do something. I need to know why they are doing it, and exactly how. A bunch of my writing time will be spent obsessing about all the little minutiae of how those spunky, precocious teens actually accessed the upper levels of the spaceship rather than just showing them actually doing it. This is both a gift and a curse. It means I really think about the motivations and practicalities of what my characters do. But at the same time, characters can just do something without complex explanations of how. I’m really starting to find the balance between these two extremes, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with it. Last night, I struggled.
Struggled like a corgi on a set of steps. Poor little short-legged bastard.
(Image via SenorGif)
The other big time-sucker in my quest to tell lame stories of plucky space-children is that I agonise over every single fucking word. Like seriously. I’ll be plodding along, mid-sentence and I’ll throw down a word then…
“No, wait. I could say that better. This is not how I want it to sound at all. What word is it that I am thinking of? It’s right there, tangled in the crazed, maze-like workings of my brain! It’s right on the tip of my tongue! Bloody Hell, why did I smoke all that weed in high school? And at uni? And after uni? It’s scrambled my brains! I’m suffering from acute lethologica and I may as well just quit writing and move to the country and start raising bloody Corgis. Ah!”
Then out comes the thesaurus, then I’m online checking out other synonyms until the word I was really looking for, the one that fits perfectly pops out at me and I fit it in and everything is right with the world until I get four sentences along and it happens all over again. It’s exhausting and infuriating and oh-so-time-consuming. It’s an epic struggle that I wage again and again.
I feel you, Bart.
(Image Via GifSoup)
I’m working really hard to temper this urge to get everything just so. I mean, it’s called a first draft for a reason, and I need to learn how to just get it out, then come back and get it right later on. Even if I just settled on a word or sentence structure in half of the instances where I get wrought over them, it would save me SO MUCH TIME.
So, those are some of my biggest time-suckers when it comes to writing (and I’m not even counting the obligatory writers procrastination), and while I am working on it, they are some nasty habits to break.
What are some of the biggest walls you hit when you write? Any tips for how I can get past these issues? Discuss it below!
There should be a ‘love’ button! I swear you’re inside my head sometimes Molly! I thought I was the only one who fixated on fitting the RIGHT word into the first draft of my work. haha! I am getting better, but I feel your pain!
One of ways I got over that (though it does still happen, but not nearly as much) was to get away from the computers and physically write it down in a notebook. Perhaps it’s the physical need to write it down that forces the focus, but I find it easier to know what it is I’m trying to say when I’m writing, not typing. Weird… but it seems to work.
Up until last year I struggled with editing as I wrote as well. I solved it by entering NaNoWriMo: the need to hit daily targets for a month forced me to just write without editing and analysing, then made it habitual. However I was already writing every week day so it might be hard to move straight from 500 occasionally to 1500+ daily.
You could try plotting and outlining more before you start writing. If you already know your characters motivations in depth then you can spent less time working the specifics out when you are writing detail.
I was hoping to get the same thing from Nanowrimo, but I failed at it spectacularly. Bleh! These are indeed sound suggestions, though – thankyou!
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