Drawing from the Well
This week, I had some wins and some losses. Right away, I missed the badge for hitting goal (1,667) every day. That’s okay. For me, that was already essentially out of reach. But I also missed the badge for updating my word count every day aka writing every day. That’s right, I had a zero day. It’s okay, though. I bounced back and am making my way back to on-track. I haven’t been on track since the first, but we’re going to get there. I’m hitting and exceeding goal again. Two days in a row now I’ve written over 2,000 words, yesterday almost 3,000, and, as you can see in the graph below, my track is swooping back up (ignore that last flattening, that’s today; I came to talk to you before I talk to myself today 😉 ). That said, I’m almost finished with the opening chapters dealing with the immediate aftermath of the cliffhanger of Book II so we’ll get into brand-new stuff soon. There was already some new stuff but it’s going to get, let’s say, foreign fast. I’m looking forward to it. Catch you up next week when I’m, hopefully, back on track or ahead.
Filling the Well
So THIS TIME, there’s nothing new to report. I’m about halfway through both Elantris and Chosen Champion but haven’t finished a book this week. This week was a weird one. I hope to be able to say something different next week.
Well Chat
As I mentioned two weeks ago, if you can manage to lower your standards, you can lower your anxiety. One way to do that is to let go of stretch goals and focus on what is attainable. Another way is to give yourself grace by saying, “It’s okay to suck.”
I have read this from so many authors and if you Google that phrase, you’ll see many articles with the exact same title as mine. It may be following well-trodden ground, but it bears repeating. Authors, myself included at times, will agonize over word choice and story construction for far longer than is necessary. That happened to me with Book III. I can try to justify it all I want as this being a bigger story with more major character arcs and reason after reason. What it really was was fear, specifically the fear to suck.
Impostor Syndrome is common among authors (I wrote about it here). It is that fear that everyone will find out that you don’t know what you’re doing. News Flash: No Author Does. We are all doing our best to make sense of these characters, worlds, and situations in our heads. It isn’t easy. It isn’t simple. It isn’t direct. No one is going to find out you don’t know what you’re doing (unless you’re putting on airs) because there’s nothing to find out. Most people are going to be so fascinated that you’re seriously writing a book that they’ll be in awe from the start. What I hear most often when I tell people I’m an aspiring author is, “Really? Wow! I could never write a book.” That is its own form of Impostor Syndrome but we’re getting off track.
To get over this crippling fear of getting it wrong, you just have to embrace that it will be wrong the first time or the first two times or the first ten times. Embrace the suck. The old adage “the only thing you can’t edit is a blank page” is intended to encourage writers to just write. It won’t be right the first time but you can always go back and adjust it and fix it and tweak it to your heart’s content up to publication. The freedom here is that you don’t HAVE to get it right on the first try.
When you’re sitting in your office, on your couch, or on your porch and it’s just you and the laptop, you forget that every other author has sat exactly in your shoes at some point. We never see the blood, sweat, and tears they pour into their novels. We only see the finished product, maybe an Advanced Reader Copy but those are essentially finished already. We don’t see the tens of thousands of words that get thrown out. We don’t see the strikethroughs or the hours of thesaurus work. The big authors you love struggle with that stuff too, just like you.
So stop agonizing over the perfect word. Your brain will seize up when you try to force it at that time. Put in a placeholder or something close and let your subconscious chew on it. You’ll get back to it. That happened to me in a text message right before I started this blog. I wanted the word “fraudulent” but it wouldn’t come to mind so I wrote “erroneous.” I stopped, looked at what I wrote, and remembered the word I really wanted. When I had stopped mid-sentence, though, I couldn’t remember it for the life of me. Give yourself some grace to be a few degrees off course on your first draft. Get your ideas on the page. You can perfect them later. I promise. I’ve done it twice already and still struggle just like you.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG