Several weeks ago, I finished the first draft of a new mermaid story. It’s a novella starring Coral Ballenato (Riatus’s little sister from Pretty in Pearls).
For me, writing the first draft is usually the hard part. I usually agonize and procrastinate and complain about it until either my deadline is approaching or I’ve exhausted even myself with my lame excuses and I finally have no choice but to write. The self-edit us usually the easy part. I’ve made my notes as I wrote along and now all I have to do is go through it, make some changes, and then send out off to either my editor or my beta readers.
With the draft done on this book, I thought I would have the whole thing self-edited and ready for my beta team within a couple of weeks.
That didn’t happen.
It still hasn’t happened.
I’m not sure when it’s going to happen.
Hitting a Roadblock
The story is a fun romance inspired by one of my favorite teen movies. I love the characters, I love the overall story, and I think my readers are going to love it too.
But something isn’t right. So far I haven’t been able to identify that something.
I’ve read through it and tried to revise it several times. I never get more than a few pages into the manuscript before throwing my pencil down in frustration and walking away.
Rather than keep pushing at something broken (and risk breaking it even more), I’m taking a break from it. I’m walking away for a few days (or a few weeks) and then when I feel like I have enough distance to see the bigger picture, I’m going to start again.
When Resistance Shows Up
Creative things go that way sometimes. It’s a fight between your creative (subconscious/instinct) brain and your critical (conscious/logical) brain.
The fight manifests in different ways and at different times in the process.
- Sometimes you know something is wrong before you’ve even started writing.
- Sometimes you know something is wrong when you struggle to write the first line.
- Sometimes you realize something is wrong halfway through the writing.
- Sometimes you don’t know something is wrong until you’re done.
- Sometimes you don’t know something is wrong until your trying to make it better.
- Sometimes you don’t know something is wrong until you realize you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to hammer a square peg into a round hole for several weeks.
I’ve faced all of those scenarios during my writing careers. And while it’s really frustrating while it’s happening, it’s also a huge relief when I realize what’s going on. Because it means I’m not crazy. I haven’t lost the will or the ability to write. Something in the story is wrong, and I can’t continue until I know what it is and how to fix it.
That’s what happened with this book. My creative brain knows the story has a problem. I gave my critical brain a few chances to figure out how to fix it, but it can’t. My creative brain is the one that has to come up with the solution.
How to Overcome
There are ways to help the process, but often it just takes time. The critical brain needs to take a break so the creative brain can wander through the story maze—an imaginary, infinite hedgerow maze that hides the answers to every story problem an author ever faced.
The creative brain might find the answer around the first corner. Like when you give up and walk away, promising yourself you won’t even think about the story until tomorrow and then, BLAM!, the moment you step out of the house, the answer hits you.
Or the creative brain might get lost for days or weeks or months before finally stumbling upon the golden treasure chest that makes you sit up from a dead sleep and shout, “Omigod, that’s IT!”
I don’t know how long it’s going to take my creative brain to figure out how to fix Coral’s story. I hope it’s soon, because she’s a hoot (think Selena Gomez on Wizards of Waverly Place) and I want the world to read her story.
But in the meantime, I’m going to do the only productive thing I can do in these situations: I’m moving on to the next project. And while I’m writing that story, my creative brain can explore every path in the story maze until it stumbles on the perfect one.
Coral and I will be waiting.
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