Just some thinking out loud in this update, and maybe fishing for a little perspective from more seasoned writers who happen to stumble across it.
Since I posted my most recent story, June 29 (which, btw, is definitely the piece I am most proud of, so if you haven’t read it, I would certainly appreciate getting a few more votes to make its score visible! Be sure to check tags first though), I’ve slowed my writing pace somewhat, which isn’t super surprising. But I have still been writing! Unfortunately, my latest project, “Under Construction,” another novel-length tale, is giving me more trouble than anything I’ve written before.
Unlike my first novel, Lupine Dreams, which followed a relatively straightforward story structure, I’ve had trouble structuring Under Construction pretty much from the start, and have already redone the entire outline once to get it to a place where I felt like it was going to work and say what I wanted to say.
I’m about 35k words (not even halfway) into actually writing it, and...whew, I dunno. Each individual scene isn’t bad, and as the story goes along, it definitely gets better. But I feel like it’s more a sequence of things that happen rather than a cohesive story.
Usually what I would do in that situation is to try to get back to the basics of what I’m trying to accomplish. Often that means I’d end up cutting a bunch of stuff to get to the most interesting parts. Unfortunately, I think cutting more out would kind of only exacerbate the problem.
Overall, although I know there’s a story in here that I want to tell, I just don’t have too much confidence I’ve found the best way to tell it. Which probably means I should go back to the drawing board to rework the very basics instead of just bolting on more stuff or chopping stuff off.
When I finished Lupine, I spent the next couple-few months working on outlines for a few different projects to see what caught my attention. The two outlines that rose to the top were the one for Under Construction and a second one. The second one honestly has probably been the one I’m more excited about getting into anyway, which is part of the reason I wanted to try and knock out Under Construction first -- then I could move on to the thing I was excited about!
That logic was probably flawed to begin with, which at least is something valuable I’ve learned about my process! In any case, I’m going to shelve Under Construction for a while to give it some space, even though a part of me definitely feels guilty about it. It’s sort of like telling a friend that I’m gonna go hang out with someone else for a bit.
What I’m most anxious about, though, is that I don’t want to end up story-hopping again and again without ever finishing anything. I don’t want to have like six half-written stories in a folder. I’m still new enough at this that I’m still forming my habits, and I don’t want to get into a bad one like that. So wish me luck!
I’d love to hear from other authors if anyone feels like sharing about their experiences when a story just doesn’t come together how you want -- preferably if it has a happy ending like “oh yeah, I put it out of my mind, wrote a couple other things, came back to it, and suddenly it clicked!” :P
In any case, thanks for reading this whole thing -- guess this blog post was actually my next novel! :P
Arcadia