Hey guys! A while back I posted and said I was going to try an experiment… Right around Christmas too. Well, you only learn from experience, right? Well, turns out, posting right around the holiday season is not very easy, so here I come, a couple weeks late. Oops! Well, as per promise, I tried to think about my WiP as much as I could over the holidays. Actually, though, I didn't think about it until after New Years, at which point I was beginning to really feel behind, and guilty for being so, so I began to analyze why I was avoiding it.
So, I've been writing 500 words every day as a challenge from the Write Chain (Look it up, it's super cool!), and as I wrote every day, I was painfully aware that every morning I woke up and planned to work on my WiP, and every night I had put it off till nine at night and ended up typing 500 words on some random project on my phone as I lay in bed, all the lights out, bedtime being postponed by my 500 words. Now, the other day, I was sitting on the couch watching an interview on Youtube with a ballerina, something I stopped doing a while back because I began to want to be a ballerina (trust me, I am no ballet dancer), and I knew in my heart of hearts, I wanted to be a writer. So this time, watching this interview, I, once again, began to want to be a ballet dancer. Then I got angry with myself. I couldn't even write the book I had wanted to for half a year, and now I was pining after something I really didn't want to do. So, I figured, if a ballet dancer had made me want to be one of her kind, then I could find writers and bloggers who inspired me to be who I was meant to be. I looked at articles, took notes, and I unintentionally began to revise my book to be better as I went along. This is where my conclusion comes in.
I have realized, in these last two weeks, that my book was too underdeveloped to be in production just yet. I realized that two characters serve no purpose (so they're going to be extracted and put into a folder, because I want to use them later), I was telling too much, instead of showing, that if I switched from my 3 person PoV to a single Main Character, I could add a lot more interest and the characters would have more reason for conversation, that some creatures I had created were ludicrous, that my settings were too vague, the theme was not very strong at all, it wasn't serving the purpose I wanted it to, and I needed a better, stronger plot. This thing was as broken as Jamie in the Bionic Woman. I needed to make it stronger, faster, and better. The 6 million dollar novel. (Sorry for the lapse into 80s culture, I'm all better now, I promise).
That was why I couldn't bring myself to write it, I had no direction, and I knew that it wasn't living up to it's full potential. Honestly, I hadn't believed that my novel would undergo the drastic change so many authors had said that their novels had done. Silly me! Now it's back in the preproduction stage, missing two characters who I fired and the plot is under reconstruction.
How about you? Have you done a novel overhaul? Are you planning on it? Any tips of your own for writing slumps? Let me know in the comments!
Viola June HFA-DGN
