IWSG: Outline-Induced Narcolepsy



IWSG

1st Wednesday of the month is Insecure Writers Support Group. It’s a blog hop where you post about the joys and difficulties of being a writer.

I’m struggling a bit with editing my WIP. I’m a pantser by nature. I wish that I weren’t. But I have a little-understood disease called Outline-Induced Narcolepsy. It’s quite serious. As soon as I set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard in an attempt to write an outline, interview characters or summarize my novel, my eyes glaze over and I pass right out, which has led to another serious condition; Qwertytis.

With my current WIP I’m using Microsoft OneNote (because I’m too cheap to buy Scrivener) to help me organize my work. I love it! Outlines bore me to tears, but I like making character profiles and town maps. I wrote out all the scene snippets that I want in the story; which is new to me. I’m usually a linear writer. I start at the beginning of the story and write in order with no idea what’s going to happen.

But oddly, being more organized hasn’t helped at all. With my last WIP I stalled out at chapter 9 because I kept re-editing the beginning and couldn’t move ahead. Guess where I’m stalled out with this one? Chapter 9. I’ve written bunches of scenes for later in the novel but nothing that will move this part of the story along. I finally had an idea, but it required a bit of re-writing to make it work. I had been trying to use MS Word’s track changes feature for anything that needed fixing so I can go back and work on it later, but this is major stuff and I sort of need to fill in the gaps to make sure it’s going to work. So now I’m writing ahead and I’m writing behind and I’m not getting any of the middle done and I’m somehow in the exact same place I was when I completely pantsed my previous WIP.

What the eff?

IWSG: Admitting Defeat

Insecure Writers Support Group Link Here.

1st Wednesday of the month is Insecure Writers Support Group. Wherein I post about the difficulties and joys of writing. I'm running a bit late this month :)

I've been very unhappy with my manuscript for a long time. I have edited the first five chapters roughly ten times and I've finally made it chapter eleven and I have just been pulling the story out of my rear because I'm not loving it anymore. It could be because I've been editing it for nearly five years and that is four years too long to be yanking my eyelashes out over it and to still not know my heroine's motivation.

So for a few months now, I've been wanting to set the story aside but I was scared to do it. I worried that perhaps I'm just being a baby about editing and that I'll be doing the same thing with my next novel when the process gets difficult. But for the last month I've been on Pinterest figuring out what my next novel's characters look like, what kind of car my heroine drives, creating the name of the small town in which it's taking place. I have been setting up my next story and avoiding my current one like the Red Death.

Then my friend and fellow writer Meika, sent me a link to a hilarious and wonderful blog post called, "25 Steps to Being a Traditionally Published Author; Lazy Bastard Edition" by Delilah Dawson. Seriously if you are a writer, you need to read it. It's helpful and funny and full of cuss words (which I love). So I read it and realized how much work is involved once the manuscript is written. After you've poured your blood and sweat and tears onto the paper, edited them, revised them, eaten your self-congratulatory cupcakes, you still have sixteen more painstaking and exasperating steps to get the thing published. And once I read those steps, I realized that I didn't like this novel enough to take those steps. At least not right now.

So I have set it aside. And it sucks. I rely heavily on my writing group for support and I feel like I let them down. I know it's for the best, but this feels a lot like a failure.

On the upside, I started my next novel and it's coming along nicely. I love my setting, I love my hero and I think my heroine is awesome. So theres that.

Yay?