Positive Self-Talk

If this isn’t a timely post, I don’t know what is. We’ll get into the details below, but I finished the Second Draft of Book III this morning…after exactly one year of work. It was exciting and demoralizing all at once, necessitating positive self-talk. And then I logged in to write this blog. What a morning already. Let’s get into it.

Drawing from the Well

Second Draft is done! Originally, I was going to say that there was more to do for the Second Draft (and there definitely is tons of work to do in general), but I needed the psychological win here. All the extra chapters are written. There are overall, sweeping notes to incorporate, which will come next, but the meat is on the bones. So, I’ll take care of the sweeping notes and then shuffle the chapters as desired. This will be a big step forward toward the final manuscript form. So, what all is left? Well…

Developmental Edit: First Chapter, Last Chapter, Overall Structure, Plot/Pacing/Arcs Understanding, Death Handling, Scene Necessity
Fine Detail Edit: Consistency, Timeline, Descriptions, Setting, Scene Setting, Vonnegut, Info Dump Recharacterization, Show Don’t Tell
Line Edit: Chapter Opening Lines, Chapter Titles, “Very” Replacements, Weak Word Replacements, Filter Words, Compression and Balance
ProWritingAid: Goals, Improvements, Overused, Reformatting
Edit Out Loud
Final Polish

Now, you might be able to see why the end still feels so far away. Hopefully, most of these will be fast. I have lots of supporting notes for almost all of these steps so at least I have a map. We’ll get there and I’ll keep you posted on my progress. For now, here’s the counts for Draft 2:

Pages 313
178,858 Words

Filling the Well

Not much on the reading front last week. There’s a lot going on personally (still), but it feels like things are starting to wind back down to normal. That’s the whole reason I was able to write this morning. For last week, at least, I read Nine Billion Turing Tests. It was long and interesting, but the twist ending blew my mind and cranked up the emotion to 11. Absolutely wild story. I loved it. It’s already in the running for Book of the Year. I’m still working on Gatsby and hope to finish it today. More next week.

Full List

24/100 for #ProjectBookworm2024

Well Chat

Perseverance is critical. On April 13, 2019, I talked all about it and one thing jumped out of this article even today: positive self-talk. So let’s chat about what this is and why it’s still important.

Today, this blog post resonates with me more than even when I planned to write it. I said this journey was “fraught with failure, rejection, and doubt.” Yup. I said authors write “because we HAVE to.” Also correct. I even touched on having the desire to write, but lacking the motivation. That remains true to this day at times. The heart of the post, though, was positive self-talk. As with the rest of the post, this remains important too.

The methods of overcoming doubt through positive self-talk five years ago were:

Look at your accomplishments
Remind yourself that your last draught ended
Tell yourself you can do it
Force it
Look around at your peers for inspiration

Those first two are excellent advice and are good for all of us (including me) to remember. I’m in the middle of lamenting that this upgrade from First to Second Draft took a year. I have to remember that the first book took over ten years to complete. Yes, I’ve been working on this one for about four, but that’s still not ten. And I DID finish the first book and publish it. I can do it again. Is it at the pace I would like? No, but I AM still making progress. Eventually, a book will come out of this.

I guess that’s the third tactic too.

Even looking to your peers for inspiration is a good idea as long as you do it properly. It’s easy to fail to keep your eyes on your own paper. The important thing is how you consume that information. If it comes in and makes you feel bad because you’re not succeeding as they are, that’s counterproductive. If, instead, you take that information and say, “That’s the success I want. Let’s go get it.” then you’re in the realm where you are spring-boarding. That’s the key.

The fourth tactic, though? That smacks of tough love. Sometimes, it can work. If you make yourself write and accept that what comes out will likely be garbage, it can be okay. At least it gets the gears turning so that, eventually, something good can come out. There is wisdom in rest, though. If you have a lot going on (like me) in multiple arenas and you’re just spent and STILL feel bad that you’re not writing, you might need to give yourself some grace. Let yourself rest. You’ll write better afterward.

The new tactic I’ve come up with is targeted distraction. This sounds complicated, but it’s very simple: work on something else. If you’re blocked, stop working on the piece of your creative project that has you stuck. Either jump to a different scene or editing step or, more drastically, move to a whole other project. It doesn’t even need to be a project you intend to release publicly one day. It can be something that is just for you. It can be a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise just to unclog the pipes. It can be ridiculous and non-sensical. The point is to get you moving creatively again. It can even make you feel good (circling back to the positive self-talk aspect of this) because you completed something which means you can complete something else. It’s a great way to supercharge your brain.

How do you take care of your self-worth through positive self-talk? Let me know on social media below.