I’ve been soooo stuck on this damn book.
Just looking for those last few chapters and not being able to get pen to paper, fingers on keyboard.
Only three chapters left after twelve others. Only a few thousand more words after 97,391 others have bled out.
I haven’t done a thing on this monster since mid-December. Yeah, I’ve been working on a short story, plan to finish editing a couple of poems I went over with my writing group last summer and I’ve been trying to make a more regular appearance here but it’s still not The Tome.
I’ve been so hung up on Finishing that I forgot the entire point of the exercise – to write the best damn book that I possibly can. Isn’t that what every writer strives to do?
Duh.
No wonder I’ve been stuck.
Picked up a copy of The Art of Slow writing by Louise DeSalvo from the library about a month ago. I’m not usually a fan of writing books. They’re too technical, too clinical. Most of them seem to take all the fun out of dancing with the muse and reduce it to a standard form of one sort or another. That said, I liked this one.
Do I agree with everything she said? Hell no! But there are good chunks here and there. Some of them (what she calls a process journal and I call my notebook) I’ve already figured out on my own because it just felt right and, more importantly, works for me. I can see where to expand the concept with future projects based on what she suggested.
Other thoughts, like don’t be afraid to fail – embrace it and learn from it, we all know but the reminder is sometimes needed like a smack upside the head.
The one that’s helping me the most though is don’t be afraid to rip it all apart and put it back together again. I’m writing a novel with five main characters that flips back and forth between all their voices and I’ve been writing it from beginning to end, not character by character. Gee, I wonder why all their voices are blending into one.
Once again, duh.
I need to rip it apart.
It’s what’s holding me back from finishing those last three chapters.
Time to start the deconstruction.
