As mentioned in my editing post, I have the same plot-line/characters that I've been working on for 6 years. Once my hook was sent into Miss Snark and I received her comments, I rewrote the hook (for my own personal satisfaction) and have since decided that the new hook means a complete rewrite of the prequel one.
Is it time for me to stop trying to perfect this story line? Should I simply put all of it in a folder and leave it alone for a few years, and work on something else in the meantime? Or should I keep torturing myself thusly and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting? Or is this just some inner nervousness - I never want the story to be finished, so I make ways for it to not be? Should I suck it up and just start trying to get the damn thing published?
Well, I don't know the answer to any of the above questions. I haven't yet decided whether to rewrite the prequel before the New Year, or to make it the first novel of Nanowriye. I just feel as though I'm not getting anywhere, that I'm not making progress at all. One draft seems just as shitty as the last when a new idea comes in.
Maybe I'm just grouchy this morning.
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2 comments:
I like your blog. You work too much. Get some sleep! And thank you for your blog. I'll keep coming back.
By all means keep writing, but you should give this particular project as long of a break as you can possibly stand. While Stephen King recommended a cooling off period of at least six weeks in his excellent On Writing, I've discovered that I need far longer than that in order to obtain enough emotional distance from my first draft in order to evaluate it fairly.
I wrote several short stories between the years 2003 and 2005, and while I attempted to edit these a few weeks/months after completing them, I'm finding that it is only now that I'm able to look at these works and see what works and what doesn't. And as much as I chomping at the bit to rewrite my first novel attempt (which I finished last March after three years of chipping away at it), I'm afraid that I'm still just too emotionally invested in the manuscript at this moment in order to do it justice.
I recommend writing something completely different to kick off the New Year. And then something else. And something else. And so on and so forth, until one day you take a peek at your old manuscript and it looks like something from a parallel universe -- unmistakably in your style of writing but at the same time wholly alien to you. Rewrites of course are to be commended, but you're way too wrapped up in it right now to do more good than harm.
Your mileage may vary as always, but those are my two cents. But don't give up!
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