In the middle of my little village on the Oregon coast, a park perches on the headland jutting into the ocean along the edge of the bay. Three white lines stand out on the concrete sidewalk.
The sun setting into the Pacific
These lines have significance on only four days of the year.
When I spoke with a client the other day, she said she was stuck and unable to write. She told me she didn’t think she was good enough to write the story. She was mired in the bog of Writer’s Doubt.
Writer’s doubt strikes every writer sooner or later. Some writers run into it in the same place in every book.
I have a critique partner who calls me in a panic with every book she writes (and she’s written a lot of them). I always ask her if she’s in chapter six. She always is. When I remind her that writer’s doubt strikes her in chapter six in every book, she’s able to continue and write a wonderful book. I know she’ll call when she gets to chapter six of the next book.
Maybe you breeze through some books, but you’re trying to write a complex plot that has you stuck. Maybe you’re working on a series and have to keep the thread of your fifth book in your mind while you are writing your third book. Maybe you’re working on a continuity series with a plot you didn’t develop and characters you didn’t create.
When writer’s doubt strikes, what can you do?
We’ve been spending time at the house on the coast. Lots to do to recover from winter.
We were told it’s been a dry winter. You can’t tell it by the vegetation. Everything has grown like crazy. A little, or a lot of rain and a little sun, really makes the plants put on growth spurts.
We chopped and raked and picked up limbs and pine cones. Some of the plants have totally overgrown others. I cut the growth back around the azalea to find that it was blooming.
Actually working in the yard is great for creativity. There’s nothing like digging around in the dirt to puzzle out a plot problem.
We have a lot of ferns that we didn’t cut before we left last fall. That means they have all these dead fronds. I’ve been pruning and pruning on them. Some are so bad that I was afraid any new growth had been pushed out.
When I cut last year’s growth away, there were little green shoots all curled up and ready to reach up to the sun. The plants looked better than I had ever imagined.
Recently, I edited a manuscript that I hadn’t looked at for awhile. I knew it needed a lot of work. It was an effort I started for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) one year. All I had was a REALLY rough draft.
I knew the story started in the wrong place. (I know very few writers who start where the story begins on the first pass.) However, I had a place to repurpose the first part, so it needed to be edited as well.
I worked through the first chapter, cutting away the dreck and expanding the texture of the story. (My first drafts are very sparse, just touching on the bones of the story.)
The final result surprised me. Some good writing lurked underneath the first-draft drivel. I really like the characters. Some day they will have a wonderful story.
I’ve always known that gardening stokes creativity. But I never realized that trimming greenery would help me find joy in editing.
What simple task renews your muse? Leave a comment below and share it.
Write on,
Lynn
