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 want to keep loving writing. That’s more important to me than being published. I want to keep writing no matter what, because my brain gets itchy when I’m not writing. If I go too long without writing, I’m miserable. But I needed a couple of weeks to let the brain fog clear and to relax into writing again without the pressure of a word count goal hanging over my head. So for the past two weeks, even though I didn’t make myself write, I found my mind drifting again and again to my stories and what I’d do with them when I picked them up again. Because there was never a question that I would go back to writing.

Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier blogged recently about what it means to be a writer. John was asked if he would ever quit writing and he basically said no, because it’s a part of who he is. Justine talked about the difference between writer as identity and writer as a career. Careers come and go, but writers write, and that’s really all there is to it. What I need to do is stop trying to write by rules that work for other people but not for me.

So I’m giving up on the daily goal of 500 or 1000 words. It’s the kind of thing that works well for a lot of people, but I don’t seem to be one of them. This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing, even writing every day. It just means that I’m not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary goal when all I should be thinking about are the stories themselves.

One of the features I liked best about Liquid Story Binder XE was the Journal, which allowed me to enter a brief summary of a character’s activities on each day of a calendar.  This kept me from having characters take days off from work with no explanation or merrily skipping Thanksgiving with no comment.

Since I’ve now moved on to SuperNotecard, which has a less useful timeline function, I started using Google Calendar to keep track of my characters’ lives.  While I prefer to use as few separate programs as possible, one of the advantages of Google Calendar is that it’s available anytime I have wifi and a browser open.  Calendars can be printed, if you’re the type who needs to look at a hard copy.  And by using a separate calendar from my personal one, I can keep it from cluttering things up.  I can even use multiple color-coded calendars for characters with different timelines.  Also, for stories that require a more detailed level of knowledge, the agenda view makes it easy to look at the character’s actions hour by hour.

I’m all about using free, easily available tools when they get the job done. I’m using Google Calendar because I already had a Google account, but I’m sure there are several other online calendars that would work the same way.

What free tools do you use to make your writing easier?

Reading the latest and greatest didn’t used to seem like a big deal, but the deeper I get into writing, the more obvious it is that I need to have a much more thorough knowledge of my chosen genre. For instance, the list of Nebula and Norton nominees just came out, and I’ve read shockingly few of them. Some of them are in my physical or virtual to-be-read piles and some I’d never heard of. I had the same experience a while ago when reading a thread on classic fantasy on the Absolute Write forums. I hadn’t heard of most of the books being discussed. So now I have a Barnes and Noble wishlist called “Fantasy I Should Have Already Read”, and I try to add one or two from that list to every order.

But I’m still re-reading, because it’s such a crutch for me. Retreating into an old favorite is like cuddling with my favorite blankie as a kid. It’s soft and comfortable and fits easily into the space I’ve already made for it. A lot of re-reading is about revisiting states of mind, whether that’s relief that a character’s painful life isn’t mine or awe at the delicious twist of a writer’s words.

Another reason I re-read is that I don’t trust my memory, especially when it comes to the earlier books in a series. Sometimes it’s because I tear through a book too fast and finish it at four a.m. when my eyes are glued permanently open. Often it’s because, as a writer, I’m so conscious of the way the smallest details impact the story. If there’s a critical detail in book one that will dramatically unfold in book two, then I want to remember it so I can have all the fun of making wild predictions as I read. Unfortunately, that means I still haven’t read the latest Harry Dresden book, nearly a year after it came out. I feel like I should re-read the first ten or whatever books, because I read them so fast I have a hard time differentiating one from the others.

But I also re-read to learn the craft of writing. When the first thrill of the story is over (though the best writers make me feel that thrill again and again), I have the space in my head to figure out why I love this character so much it hurts or why that plot makes me skip ahead to the best parts instead of being caught up by the whole story. Learning a craft is about studying the masters, and I do take that seriously. But I’m not sure anyone needs to read The Complete Sherlock Holmes twenty times. (And I’m not even exaggerating.)

Obviously, the solution is to re-read sometimes and read new stuff other times. To encourage myself, I’ve made an effort to buy more books lately instead of relying on the library. Partly this is because I’ve grown more conscious of writing as business and want to support my favorite authors. Partly it’s so I always have new books on hand and no excuses.

I haven’t come up with the perfect new to old ratio, because that would be a little crazy even for me, but every time I look at an old book and think how nice it would be to re-read it, I’m going to think about what I really want. Do I want a medieval fantasy setting like The Lord of the Rings? A character like Phaedra from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books who challenges and engages? A plot like any of Jim Butcher’s books that grabs me by the throat and leaves me gasping at the end? Something in Roger Zelazny’s style? Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s relatively easy to find a book to cure my craving. Not to mention the books by my favorite authors (Zelazny) that I have accumulated but not yet read.

So am I completely crazy? Is anyone else this conflicted about re-reading? Or does everyone else read a book, shelve it, and move on to the next?