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Q&A Tools to overcome a block from: "My words are bad"

I'll offer a frame challenge here. Personally, I embrace the rewrite, and the deletion. I recently finished a long novel, a year-long project, and by my count, I read the whole thing twenty times. ...

posted 5y ago by Amadeus‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Amadeus‭ · 2020-01-13T19:20:24Z (almost 5 years ago)
I'll offer a frame challenge here. Personally, I embrace the rewrite, and the deletion. I recently finished a long novel, a year-long project, and by my count, I read the whole thing twenty times. Some parts, like the opening and climax scenes, I probably read fifty times.

A story about Hemingway (I don't know if its true), he was writing in a hotel, made a friend at the bar, and one day the friend asks him, how much did you get done today? Hemingway said, "It took all day, but I added a comma to a sentence."

The next day, same question: How much did you get done today? Hemingway said, "I deleted that comma from yesterday."

That's me. I can write ten pages in a day, and never change them, or I can write a half page of dialogue and tweak it twenty times. Some scenes are tough for me.

I do keep daily, time-stamped backups of everything I write, even though I seldom consult them. But because of that, I have deleted a dozen pages of a scene because it was just a waste of time, I wrote it, I went through it five times, then deleted it, because I decided it was a stall, I needed to move on to some actual conflict.

I have little interest in being efficient, or to be accurate, I think the efficient thing to do is write something your characters would actually do next (because you know them), and if that isn't going anywhere then delete it and think of something else, figure out what might advance the story. If it advances the story, great, flesh it out, with details. Fix it, better imagine the visuals of the scene, the character positions and actions during the scene, don't forget to add color, add scent if applicable, find spots for humor if you can, add thoughts and reactions, body language, facial expressions, sounds and irritants and touch and taste, or at least consider them.

I don't do that all at once, often when I don't know what to write next, I go back 2 or 3 chapters and start reading, and correcting flaws, but reading to get an idea of what naturally happens next.

I know I am done with a scene when I've been away from it for awhile, and then read it, and don't notice a thing that irritates me.

I am creating a work of art, I don't need to do that efficiently. I do have a system for getting it done and finishing novels, but I reject ideas like "three edits and you're done." I'm done when I know I'm done.