Lesson learned

Sometimes you have to learn a lesson a few times before you remember that you already learned that lesson.

Dear Writer,

Three weeks into drafting.

It’s always three weeks.

It takes about three weeks between when you start drafting and you finish Act I. You’ve set everything up, developed your sense of tone, got really cocky in the middle of week 2 because you were killing it hitting those word counts every day, and it’s so easy to forget what’s coming: the drafting doldrums.

Last week, I had a couple of zero word days. There was some Life Interference™ which is to be expected, but then after a day or two of getting back on that horse and hitting my word counts, I had another zero day.

Then one of the Year of Writing Magically cohort also had a zero day. And then another one did. And another.

And then I clocked my third zero in a week, and that’s when I finally remembered that this used to happen to me all the time, right at the transition from Act I to Act II. By that point, the central narrative conflict has shifted, evolved, gained nuance, and I need to take a little time to rethink my approach, add elements that I hadn’t anticipated, layer in some depth.

I have always hated the doldrums during previous drafting sessions, but now that I understand story better (and have been through a lot of therapy) I think I don’t hate them so much anymore.

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It used to be that I felt I had to hit my words all the time or I was somehow failing. I don’t feel that way anymore. Now I understand that a story needs what it needs, and when I need to not write for a day or two (or five) to re-evaluate where things stand with the story and get a new sense of the terrain, then that’s okay. I trust myself that I’m not making excuses just to get out of working. I love the work; I’m not going to make excuses not to do it. If the work isn’t moving, there’s a reason, and the fastest way to deal with that reason is to stop and listen to it.

Also, I have experience with this particular dog fight, and I know how it ends. In the past, I pushed myself to keep writing, no matter what. Every day, get those words down. And if I push through the doldrums, the result is always the same; I travel about 10,000 words down the wrong road before realizing I took a bad turn and then I have to frog¹ everything to go back to the place where I should have just stopped and taken a few days to think. In the end, pushing through slows me down even more because instead of thinking, I’m writing, and going in the wrong direction because I didn’t take the time to examine the new terrain.

So.

You live.

You learn.

You write.

You stop.

You pause.

You trust.

And then you get going again.

Lesson. Learned.

Everything,

L

1. Frogging is a yarn craft term; if you knit or crochet for a while and realize you made a mistake, you have to pull out all the stitches back to the last place when everything was working. Applies perfectly to writing as well as yarn.