I’m in a bit of a rut. Or maybe it’s a plateau. Whatever it is, I’m stuck in place, spinning my wheels and not producing much of anything.
I’m stuck on some aspect of four different stories. I’m overwhelmed by the revising I need to do on Sword and Knife so I thought, ok, I’ll work on something else for a while. And that worked for revising and submitting a draft of Devil, a short story. But now I’m stuck again. I went back to Nyx with the hope that being away from it for six months or so would help me figure out what’s wrong with it. And maybe I have, but I still don’t know how to fix it. So I skipped to another short story, about vampires. And remembered it has no plot, as well as a host of other problems. I gave it a plot, but now I’m overwhelmed with worldbuilding. So I turned to a newer idea I had a couple of months ago, nicknamed Nightwalker. And I’m thrashing around with that too.
It hasn’t been that long since I wrote something from scratch. Just November, in fact. But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to build a story from the bottom up. And it’s driving me crazy.
This is one of those times I have to remind myself that I’m writing because I like it, not because I expect it to bring me fame and fortune. I don’t even want fame, though I wouldn’t mind the fortune. But sometimes I’m disappointed when it seems like I haven’t gained any ground, like this newest story is just as hard to write as the last.
I have to slow down, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m learning, and it’s ok if I don’t learn each new skill at the same rate. All stories are different and they all take different skills to write. So I’m in a phase right now where I’m learning a lot. It’s not that I’m stagnating, it’s that I’m working away at the problems in the back of my head and thrashing them out on a computer screen.
Instead of expecting perfection or even readability with each new project, I need to slow down, breathe, and just write.
I know this, and yet I resent that I have to chant those words like a mantra every time I hit a new plateau.
Breathe. Write. Breathe.
I know how you feel. I’ve started the second draft for a story I codenamed Lynn2, and I still have to rewrite a few other stories. Anyway, I’m kinda stuck, even with my freewriting. I know, freewriting shouldn’t be easy to get stuck on…but I am. Grrrrr….
Sometimes all I have to do to get a little spurt of writing energy is complain publicly that I can’t write. But then it went away. Wrote 1,500 words or so after I wrote that blog post though. At least it’s something.
I’m a barely beginning fanfic writer who has no idea of what I’m doing nor the technical parts of writing and only stumbled upon you thanks to your amazing “102 Resources for Fiction Writing”. I completely understend that no skill is easy gainedand yet even I am frustrated by my awful lack of productivity and overal work-quality.
So I take this chance not only to thank you for your help to all writers but to wish you luck in all your personal proyects.
Lots of love ♥