The Insecure Writer and Being Efficiently Productive

 

Today is February's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.

Why am I an insecure writer this month?

Because it’s beginning to dawn on me that I may not have what it takes to be a productive writer.

You may wonder what I’m talking about. After all, I’m finishing up the edits on my debut urban fantasy, and I’m already deep into writing the sequel, so I am being productive. But I’m not being efficiently productive.

It took a depressingly high number of years just to get to this point in my writing career, and while that may not be all that unusual for early writers who are still learning the craft, I kind of figured things would begin speeding up at some point. Unfortunately, after spending all of January working on my revisions, my progress has been dismal.

 

I’m a slow writer, and that doesn’t change when I’m in editing mode. In particular, I find it especially difficult to make significant changes to a scene that I already deemed finished. Not that the problems pointed out by my editor aren’t real, but trying to reimagine the way to write a scene after it’s already been put down on paper (or hard drive) is amazingly hard for me. I stare at the words for hours at a time without a clue. I pound away at the words for days or weeks, trying this and trying that, seeing what sticks to the wall. Usually with little success.

Eventually, I hit that paradigm shift that allows me to see how the scene should be written. It’s my “Eureka!” moment. My vision clears. The seas part. I breathe a sigh of relief, then get on with the writing. But up until that “a-ha” moment, I’ve done nothing but bang my head against a stone wall.

But that’s my process. It’s who I am, so I can’t do too much about it. What really bothered me this month is the realization that part of the reason my revising has been so slow is because I’ve been avoiding my manuscript. I spent way too much time doing chores around the house or watching TV shows or checking out social media or sleeping. Anything to avoid sitting down in front of that laptop and facing that damn stone wall. If I’d just forced my butt into that chair and concentrated more often, I might have been finished my now.

 

And that’s on me.

In these heady days where a person who only writes three books a year is considered to be a slow writer, I’m absolutely glacial. If I hope to have any success with this writing thing, I’ll need a lot more determination and grit. Some way of making myself write even when the writing is tough. That’s what real writers do.

 

Take care everyone, and stay safe! 

ChemistKen

The Insecure Writer and Dealing With Revisions

 

Today is June's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.

What makes me an insecure writer this month?

The tedious process of revising my debut manuscript.

It’s not as if I haven’t already edited the heck out of my novel over the past five years. It’s been through two critique groups, and I’ve gone through it myself so many times I practically have it memorized. In fact, I felt it was in good enough shape to schedule a copy edit with a professional editor. All seemed to be good.

Then I sent a copy to a beta reader who has some experience with urban fantasies (Thanks, Loni).

Unfortunately, she found a few problems in areas I hadn’t considered. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but she basically had a problem with both the protagonist and the antagonist. Arg! Nothing that can't be fixed, mind you, but some of those fixes will require major modifications to the story and that’s what’s setting off my insecurities.

I’ve always had difficulty making changes to scenes I felt were essentially finished. Once I have the scene the way I like it, I have a hard time imagining the scene happening in any other way. It's a mental thing. I’m making my way through my manuscript, tackling scenes one at a time, but it's slow process. Changes in one scene often necessitate making changes elsewhere in the story. My biggest fear is that after I finish all these revisions, the professional editor will come back with all sorts of new problems, requiring yet another painful rewrite.

And I thought writing the first draft was hard.

June's question: For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? 

Maybe this isn’t the best way to write, but I’m constantly going back and editing chapters even as I’m working on the first draft. Since I’m such a slow writer, however, it may be six to twelve months before I return to a chapter I’ve already worked on, which gives me plenty of time to look at the words with fresh eyes.  

Take care everyone, and stay safe! 

ChemistKen

Spending Too Much Time On The First Draft

Photo courtesy of Pixabay and Voltamax

I’m always on the lookout for ways to increase my writing speed. Based on what other writers tell me, I spend a lot more time on first drafts than everyone else. There are various reasons for this, but one of the biggies is that I revise as I write. Not full revisions, mind you, but if I know that a sentence or paragraph doesn’t make complete sense, I have to fix them before I can go on. Or if my descriptions sound like bullet lists, my muse refuses to cooperate until I go back and dress them up a little. Or if a logic flaw rears its head…. Well, you get the drill.

I know writers are supposed to speed through the first draft, but leaving behind a big pile of problems that need to be fixed later just seems like procrastination. Better if I fix some of the more glaring problems right then and there while the scene is still fresh in my mind. Now these aren’t my final revisions. Oh no, far from it. But they’re enough to allow me to move on with a clear conscience.

But here’s my problem. After spending all that time thinking about these first draft revisions, I’ve discovered that the resulting sentences and paragraphs kind of get locked down in my head. So when I return later during the editing phase, I often can’t visualize writing the words in any other way, even when I know there’s a problem. I can tweak a word here or there with no problem, but if a paragraph needs to be blown up and rewritten from scratch, it can take days for me to recognize this. The number of hours I’ve wasted staring at a paragraph that isn’t working before I realized a simple reordering of words would solve the problem is embarrassingly high.

So now I’m trying a new approach. From now on, whenever I feel the need to revise during the first draft, I’ll make sure to keep my added sentences short and full of telling prose. That way I’ll have no choice but to rewrite them from scratch.

Will my muse allow this? Only time will tell.

ChemistKen

The Time Needed Between Revisions

I’m not a happy camper writer these days.

Ten months ago, I had a nice little writing routine. I had (and still have) two critique groups, both of which met once a month. Back then, the people in Group A were my first alpha readers, often reading my chapters shortly after I wrote them. Group A provided me with valuable insights as to what was working and what wasn’t, and after collecting their comments and suggestions, I’d set the chapter aside to simmer and move on to the next one.

Group B is my next wave of readers. They don’t see a chapter until after I’ve made the revisions from Group A. Since Group B is farther behind in the story, it was usually several months before I needed to make these revisions. This meant I approached the chapter with fresh eyes when the time came to ready it for Group B. And as most of you know, spending time away from your words before revising them is a good thing.

Unfortunately, “months” have now turned to “days.” For a whole slew of reasons (missed crit group meetings, failure to submit chapters when they weren’t ready, differences between submission lengths), Group B has now caught up with Group A. This month, I submitted my latest chapter to Group A on the 8th, received the crits back on the 15th, then rushed to incorporate these changes (some of them significant in scope) before submitting the chapter to Group B less than ten days later. 

Ten days may seem like a long time for some of you fast writers out there, but to me it’s like speed writing—on steroids! Not to mention the fact that I was already so tired of staring at that damn chapter by the time I’d turned it in to Group A, it was a real slog to reopen it in order to do the revisions for Group B.

So what am I going to do next month? I’m going to have Group B critique some other stuff (earlier chapters, other stories) until Group A builds up a good lead on them again. It’s the only way I can climb out of this mess.

Who knows? Maybe this is the incentive I need to write a short story for the IWSG anthology.

ChemistKen

Putting Things Off, But in a Good Way

I’ve been in edit mode these past few weeks and, as usual, I can’t help but notice most of my revisions involve rearranging the order in which my sentences are written. Sometimes it’s only a sentence or two, but often it’s whole paragraphs. Occasionally it’s entire scenes. I don’t seem to have the knack for writing things down in the appropriate order during my early drafts.

No surprise there, but what really surprised me was that most of these changes involved moving the words farther back in the story as opposed to moving them forward. I rarely tell the reader stuff too late. My problem is telling the reader stuff too early.

Now I’m sure this happens to all writers to some extent. Most of us infodump in the early drafts, and that pile of information needs to be whittled down and moved back until the reader absolutely needs it. But even when I have a paragraph or two of information I wouldn’t consider an infodump, I’ve discovered it’s still better to move the information as far back in the story as possible.

I suspect my difficulties stem from teaching chemistry classes and giving research seminars. I’ve grown accustomed to explaining a topic in a nice linear fashion that maximizes understanding and (hopefully) decreases the number of questions I get at the end. It doesn’t occur to me to leave out information just to leave the class wanting more. So when I have the characters in my stories explain something to other characters, I usually have them spill everything they know about the subject. Good for teaching, not so good when writing fiction.

In real life, most people explain things in a haphazard manner—wandering about the topic, leaving stuff out, and often contradicting themselves in the process. And good writers take advantage of this quirk. Think about the conversations in your favorite books or movies. Rarely does the character explain things thoroughly. The information usually comes in snippets, with just enough to make you want to know more. And how many times have you seen a character leave out important points during a conversation so that another character (and the reader) can be surprised later?

So even when it makes perfect sense for a character to mention A, B, and C when talking to another character, the story is often better served by mentioning A, vaguely hinting at B, and ignoring C altogether. The trick is to dole out just enough information to leave the reader asking more questions.

How Do We Know When Our Stories Are Finished?

Every day I receive a “Kick in the Pants” email from David Farland’s blog. They’re filled with valuable tips about writing and I always look forward to them. Last week, he posted a link to a Q & A video about writing, and one of the participants asked the following question: “I still wake up at night with new ideas and revised dialogue for my story. How will I know when my story is finished?”

David’s response was that as long as his brain was still sending him new ideas then his story wasn’t finished. In other words, this was his brain’s way of telling him the story wasn’t ready for prime time. While I see his point, I’m not entirely sure I agree with it. At some point, I think you have to put an end to the tinkering and say “enough is enough,” even when your brain is still churning out ideas.

Although I’m writing my own stories these days, I still occasionally work on the fanfic story I began writing over five years ago. I learned a lot about writing during that time, and my fanfic has gone through countless revisions as I applied everything I’ve learned. Yet despite the fact that some of the earlier chapters have probably been edited and revised umpteen million times, I still occasionally dream up new ways of tweaking them. (Usually during a shower or while I’m driving to work.)

The question is: Do these changes really make the story better after all this time? Sometimes yes, but usually not by much. I suspect these new ideas are more like shiny new toys, perhaps some new technique I just discovered in a writing book. Fun to think about and experiment with, but not really improving the story. Different perhaps, but not better.

So I’ve come to understand that I’ll never stopping thinking of new ways to write a chapter, even long after the chapter has been finished. At some point, I’ll just have to force myself to write “The End” and move on. Because if I wait for the ideas to stop rolling in, I’ll never publish a story.


When do you stop making changes to your stories?

Revising Your Manuscript Is Like Fighting With Yourself

I’m in the middle of revisions right now (seems like I’m always in the middle of revisions) and though I’ve been reasonably pleased with my progress, it’s still a frustratingly slow process. For me, revising often feels like sculpting a block of metal by striking it repeatedly with a large hammer while blindfolded. Subsequent revisions involve repeating the process with successively smaller hammers. Not an elegant process by any definition.

Still, I’ve come to the realization that a significant portion of my editing amounts to moving blocks of words from one part of the page to another. I may still need to tighten up dialogue or add more descriptions or squeeze in a few more interior thoughts, but my first editing pass (or three) usually involves massive rearrangements of my words. I may know everything that has to go into the scene, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that I rarely know the order in which the words should appear on the page—at least at the beginning of the revision process.

For example, I've struggled with a piece of dialogue for days, desperately trying to make it seem like a natural part of the conversation, and then, in a moment of inspiration, I realize I could move it somewhere else in the scene and suddenly the dialogue fits like a piece in a puzzle. Arg! Mindnumbingly obvious once I think of it, but hard to see initially because my brain had already decided it knew how the scene should unfold.

So basically, I spend most of my revision time fighting with myself.  That's why I have critique partners—to stop by every once in a while and referee.

Do you struggle with this, or does the order of your words just come naturally to you?

The Value in Being a Critiquer

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve run into a bit of a stone wall with regards to my new MG fantasy. So this week I dedicated myself to going back and working on my fan fiction story. Since it’s in the revision stage, I get to utilize a different part of my brain, which lets the creative side get some much needed rest.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the quality of my chapters varies significantly. The first several chapters flow nicely (finally!), but later chapters aren’t as smooth as I remember them being. I suppose this should make me sad (and it does), but not as much as I would have expected. Though I’m disappointed these chapters need more work, I’m pleased my inner editor’s eye is getting better at spotting problems. Paragraphs that seemed fine six months ago now seem weak and flabby.

So why is my inner editor improving? I suspect it’s because of all the critiquing I’ve been doing lately. Searching for bloated paragraphs and inconsistent logic in someone else’s work makes it easier to spot the same problems in your own work. After I've dinged an author for using an awkward sentence structure several times in a chapter, I can't help but spot the same problem in my chapters.  So my advice is to never stop critiquing. And remember, no matter how great your inner editor becomes, you still need to let someone else critique your own work. You’re too close to your own story to see all the problems. Besides, by letting someone else critique your story, you’re helping their inner editor grow too. It’s a win-win situation.

Hmmmm… Will my inner editor ever stop getting better or am I doomed to forever return to my previous chapters and discover they need more work?  Scary thought.

Sometimes, I'm My Own Worse Enemy

I’ve come to the realization that one of the biggest obstacles I face when editing my story is… me.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but after staring at a chapter for a while, sometimes over the course of months or even years (remember, I’m a slow writer), I find myself suffering from plot blindness. I get so used to seeing the scenes unfold in the same way every time I read through them, it’s nearly impossible for me to envision the chapter unfolding in any other way. And that can be a major hindrance if the chapter needs any kind of restructuring. I simply cannot see what's wrong, and so it usually requires an act of God for me to recognize the problem.

Although usually, it’s my CP.

Thanks, Sher.

Of course, even when I know how the story should be restructured, the battle is still only half over. Although I may understand that restructuring a scene is the right thing to do on a conscious level, deep down inside the recesses of my brain, I’ll fight that change to the death. The old version is still so ingrained in my mind that it can take weeks of work and internal struggle before I clean up all the rough spots.

Despite these obstacles, I finished just such a restructuring this evening, which explains the rather haphazard nature of this post.  It also means it’s time to send the chapter off to my CP. Hopefully she won’t discover another restructuring that I missed.

The Insecure Writer and the Slow Pace of Revising

Today is February's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.


What makes me an Insecure Writer this month?

Time. And the way it slips away from me.

If you read my last post, you’ll know I spent nearly all of January stuck on a revision of one of my early chapters. Four freaking weeks! All spent on a chapter that had already been through multiple revisions. Argggh!

I suppose I could have moved on to some other less challenging part of the book for a while, but I’d promised that chapter to a CP and I was bound and determined not to do anything else until I’d fixed the problems – or at least enough of them that I didn’t feel guilty sending it to him.

The worst part is that this is not an uncommon occurrence for me. I may fly through 80-90% of a chapter with no problem, but it’s that last 10-20% that can stop me cold. It’s like I hit a brick wall, and staring at those darn pages for weeks at a time just sucks the life right out of me. And skipping to an easier section doesn’t solve the problem either – it only pushes it back. At some point I’m going to have to fix that troublesome spot, and only the slow, brute force method of trying sentences over and over again is going to work.

And that’s when the weeks begin to add up.

I already have limited amount of time to write. If this keeps up, I’ll be lucky to finish a book every decade.

Argggh indeed!

Sometimes I Just Hate Writing!

Finally! A post!

No, I haven’t given up on this blog. I’ve just been in a self-imposed exile for the last few weeks. Back at the beginning of January, I was all set to send out one of my early chapters to a CP when I discovered it was in much worse shape than I remembered. So I tried to tweak it into shape -- a little bit here, a little bit there, but it soon became apparent that the chapter required more than a tweak. It needed an overhaul. The current structure just wasn’t working.

As the days passed, I poured more and more time into that chapter, eventually vowing not to write another blog post until the chapter was in reasonable shape.

I’m happy (relieved) to report I finally reached that point. Kind of. The chapter flows more smoothly now, but still needs plenty of work. Nevertheless, it’s in good enough shape for my CP to read and that’s enough for now. Besides, I’ve learned that I can’t stare at a chapter for more than a couple of weeks before my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts down. I’ll need a couple of weeks (at least) before I can look at it objectively again.

So I expect to be posting on a regular basis again. Just in time for next week’s Insecure Writers post. Talk about perfect timing. My insecurity meter has already pegged out.

I do, however, have some good news to share. At one point during this revision from hell, I needed to go back to my first chapter and verify some fact. And for the first time ever, I was able to read one of my chapters and feel that it’s close to something a real writer might have written.

Progress!

The Insecure Writer and The New Year

Today is January's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.


What makes me an Insecure Writer this month?

The fact that my progress last year was abysmally slow and I have no idea if this year will be any better.

Last January, my goal was to finish revising my story by Christmas. An entire year dedicated to accomplishing this one, seemingly simple task. Needless to say, I missed that goal. By quite a lot. Despite making good progress on the story at the end of the year (I was off from work the last two weeks in December), I’m still only a quarter of the way through the story. At this rate, it’ll be three more years before it’s finished. Argh!

Despite these facts, I’m still hopeful that my New Year’s resolution of finishing the story by Christmas 2013 is doable. Misguided optimism? Probably, but I think things will move more quickly this time around. The first quarter of my story required massive restructuring and that accounted for the lion’s share of my writing time. I believe (hope, pray) that subsequent chapters are  in better shape and will go more quickly – although my critique partner may have something to say about that.

My other New Year’s resolution is to cut down on the number of blogs I read. I follow well over a hundred blogs – or so my RSS feed tells me – but I simply don’t have the time to keep up with the majority of them any longer. And after three years of reading posts about writing, there isn’t much I haven’t seen dozens of times already. So, during the next couple of months, I’m going to whittle down the number of blogs I read - concentrating on websites that either give the best writing advice or those that I read for enjoyment.

Happy New Year!

The Insecure Writer and Not Being Insecure

Today is December's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.




Whew! I almost missed writing this month’s Insecure Writer post.

I suppose I could blame NaNo and the holidays for this lapse, but I think the real reason is that I don’t feel all that insecure this December. This might sound a bit surprising considering I only managed 25K words during NaNo, but I learned a lot about my writing methods in the last month and I’m feeling much better about this whole writing thing.

Of course, next month I’ll probably be insecure again, but that’s the life of a writer, isn’t it?

Here’s what I learned from NaNo.

1. I’m a slow writer. (LOL, I’ve known that for years) But I also learned I can write quickly as long as I have a good grasp of what a scene is about and where it’s headed. The scene will need massive revisions before anyone can see it, but my scenes always need massive revisions -- even when I write slowly.

2. I discovered I’m a plotser. No matter how much I plot beforehand, until I start putting the words down on paper I have no idea what the real plot will be until I finish the first draft. Angela Quarles apparently has the same problem.

3. As a result of all this re-plotting, my NaNo story is now far stronger than it was before. Yay!

4. Staying away from my original WIP for the last month has made me even more eager to get it finished.

That's all for now.  I promise to be more insecure next month – assuming we all survive the 21st of December, that is.

At Least My Garden Is Coming Along Nicely

Back in March, I showed you a picture of my garden in all its post-winter messiness glory and discussed how gardening is much like writing a book. Here’s what the garden looks like now.

Considering the heat and lack of rain, I’m relatively pleased with the garden, although there should be a good deal more yellow in the photograph. Unfortunately, we live next to a *&^$#@ woodchuck who insists on eating every marigold the instant it flowers.

I only wish my story could undergo such a dramatic metamorphosis in just four months.

I’m happy to say I just finished a rewrite of my third chapter and sent it out to my CP. I’m unhappy to say I spent three full weeks doing the rewrite. Arggg! Where did the time go? I suppose three weeks wouldn't have been so bad if the chapter had turned out nice and polished, but it didn’t. The only reason I stopped at three weeks was because I was so sick of staring at that chapter, I knew there would be no further improvements until I had spent a month or two away from it. So I just sent it off to my CP as is and let her deal with it. (Sorry, Sheryl)

Anyway, I’m moved on to the next chapter. But before I open the file, I plan on staring at the picture of my garden for a while and thinking happy thoughts.

The Insecure Writer and the Revision Process

Today is February's contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group.




I’ll be honest with you. If my monthly post for the Insecure Writers Support Group wasn’t due today, I probably wouldn’t have posted. Embarrassment can do that to you.

Last week I promised I would finish the initial revision of my first chapter by the end of the weekend -- no matter what. Well, it’s Wednesday, and I still haven’t finished. It’s almost there, probably about 99% complete, but it’s not finished. (Hangs head in shame)

I wish I could say it was because I didn’t spend enough time with my manuscript or that I didn’t stay up late enough or that drinking was involved – but that wasn’t the problem. I just couldn’t come up with any good ways to fix a few problem areas. I find it maddening (and slightly ridiculous) that I’ve been screwing around with these same fourteen pages for over three weeks now -- with most of that time spent on the first two paragraphs. At this rate, my kids will be published authors before I finish this story.

The funny part about all this is that the idea of revising and polishing and tightening my manuscript sounds kind of sexy to me – at least in theory. I occasionally have to write computer programs, and like a lot of programmers, once the program is behaving properly I have an almost irresistible urge to go in and tighten up the code. Removing useless bits of code, converting ten lines of code into two, improving the user interface. Stuff like that. It just gives me a warm cozy feeling.

But that’s because I know what I’m doing when I program. But until my writing skills improve, it’s always going to be a struggle when it’s time to revise my manuscript. I can tell (usually) when something needs to be fixed, I’m just bad at coming up with ways to actually fix the problem.

Does anyone else have these kind of problems during the revision process?