After flying high the first two weekends of November in my novel…I hit the wall.
Roland/xrecent said it well from yesterday’s write-in said it well: the wall is big and scary because you don’t know what is happening at the other side. In Chris Baty’s words last 2004:
You’ll know you’ve hit the Wall when you start thinking that the whole endeavor is futile. When you start worrying that you don’t have the time or imagination to pull it off, and you come to see your story as an unmitigated disaster that should be put out of its misery before the thing gets old enough to remember where you live.
And I’ve been hitting it a lot the past week — talk about being caught in a total Week 2 slump.
It started with my MC’s crying mode last week. I managed to write a better chapter but it was still terribly boring, and hard to write. I thought that would be okay, but then when I started on the next chapter, I was stumped. What happens now?
It was annoying. And then my internal editor decided to show up, and it keeps on telling me how flat my writing is and how emo everyone has become and how I approached it wrongly and how I should just start from the very first part and write again and not think of finishing the entire story this month. I tried to look for some dares and prompts (like including Plum trees in the novel even if there are no plum trees there) but none worked. Yesterday it told me my build up was too slow, and I should have just plunged in and that I really did not know my characters at all…and it really drove me crazy. I wondered if the story was even worth telling at all.
So last night, after being so frustrated with what I’ve been doing, I took another break. I took a shower and thought of how to approach things in the story. I always get my best ideas in the shower and I really hoped to get it then. Slowly, as I rinsed off the shampoo, I found some glimmer of new ideas inside my head, another way to approach the story.
And today I wrote.
I’ve managed to hit 38k already, and I’m still writing along steadily. I do hope I can get through this particular rough patch, and get to the exciting parts (which I honestly still have no idea how to write). I think I’ll be doing some outlining in my spare time soon.
Anyway, before I go to bed today so I can start early tomorrow for some early morning writing, here’s one of the versions of Chapter 7, which I don’t know if I will be able to include at all. It was slightly fun to write though, even if I think it absolutely sucks. :P