Is it possible to read your own words too much? (and begin to hate them as a result)
I'm working through my chapter 1 for about the 5th time. As a generality, I love my story and characters, all of them, even the psychotic ones.
But, it is becoming more and more of a slog to make through chapter 1. I plan to do about 12 rounds of edits, each one geared towards a different aspect (character voice, one edit. Grammar, one edit. Consistency of elements, one edit. etc).
Chapter 1 has had the most work done on it, because I am in writing groups. It is probably the objectively best written chapter so far, but I am beginning to hate being anywhere 'in' it. I'm sick of it!
Question: Is it normal to feel like your writing (Chapter 1, in this case) is getting worse (more boring, tedious, and awful), even if it may be objectively improving?
(should I be discouraged? I am discouraged. Please tell me this experience is normal. And not a sign that the whole thing is actually garbage.)
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2 answers
Don't do it.
You shouldn't be doing something in writing that isn't at least tolerable. You need a different style of writing.
I say that as a writer that has gone over a three page scene THIRTY times, but I found it tolerable, and I was crafting something critical. It was not mechanistic. I don't worry about grammar, or voice. I do worry about consistency.
But I hear stories and voices and, like a hiccup in a song, I can feel when something isn't perfect, when dialogue is wrong, when action isn't natural, so I read and fiddle until it sounds right. The cadence of speech is right, the time of exposition is right.
When I write I am a narrator and an actor, a story teller. I care about clarity, not grammar. I care about creating an immersive scene without drowning the reader in too much detail. I care about sustaining attention by sustaining the chain of conflicts.
When your story sounds right to you, put it away for a week. Let your short and mid term memory systems fade it out, so they aren't providing any inadvertent help to the printed word. THEN read it again, and if there are problems, fix them. Do it again. It won't take 12 cycles of editing.
Work in a way that you enjoy 75% of the time, and can tolerate the other 25%. Writing can be your job without dreading sitting down to work.
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I think this is what separates the pros from the amateurs and the unpublished from the published. Writing is hard. Getting it right can take a huge amount of work and many writers report being royally sick of a book by the time they have finished it, or even by the time they have finished the first draft.
I am certainly at that stage with my big non-fiction book on structured writing. I hate the sight of it. But my editor keeps sending me notes, and keeps pointing out weaknesses, so I have to go back into it and slog it out and make it better. And my editor tells me my edits are making it better, and I know they are making it better too, once he forces me to look at the hateful thing for what seems like the five thousandth time.
But that is what the pros do. They keep working on it even after it stops being fun, because, for them, it is not simply the fun of creating that matters, it is the satisfaction of having created something good. The final push from meh to good is often a weary slog. That's probably why there is so little really good stuff. Most people stop when it stops being fun.
The other thing that the pros can do is that they can tell the difference between hating something because it is bad and hating it because they are sick of looking at it. That's harder for me with fiction than with non fiction. Sometimes I just have to put a MS in a drawer for a while before I can tell the difference.
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