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The Weirdness of Recovering from Writer’s Block
Threw this up on my social media accounts so decided to drop it in here because it’s just a very strange feeling to be going through at the moment haha.
I first wrote Steel Roses (85K words) back in like 2015 and went on to write 7 other novels in that series.
After the 8th novel in the series, (which was also my 13th novel overall,) I burnt out!
I knew I wanted to go back to Steel Roses and rewrite it now that I was so much better at writing but that Writer’s Block was next level and it was SO hard to get through a paragraph, let alone a page or chapter of BOOK!
At one point through that fight, I rewrote, from scratch, around 65k words of the book.
And I HATED it!
Hated everything about it. Hated Beldon and his personality. Hated the way he and The Beast interacted. Hated the vibe and feel and wording of the book and I scrapped the whole thing.
It left a really bad taste in my mouth for that draft and I knew I’d have to start again when I could face it.
I have finally come back to Steel Roses again and, though it’s taken a lot of work, it feels like the writer’s block is starting to shift. I redid the first few chapters and felt so much better about them.
(They were even the ones that accidentally got me a full MS request when I had the chance to get feedback on my agent submission package, so I knew I was back on the right track haha.)
I’m about 27K words in again and I’ve reached a major confrontation scene. And I knew I had written some decent descriptive text in the 2nd rewrite that I wanted to copy.
I found it, reread it… and ended up copying the whole chapter into place, because it actually wasn’t as terrible as I’d convinced myself it was when I’d been writing it. (Yay for Imposter Syndrome, not!)
(And it either means it was a well-written chapter at the time or I wasted 65K words… eh.)
I copied it in, and I’ll probably copy in the next chapter too, but the thing I’m finding so weird about copying these chapters in??
IT FEELS LIKE I’M CHEATING!!!
Like, it’s cheating for me to use the words I wrote, just because I didn’t write them in THIS draft!
I’m not stealing work, Brain! I wrote this! I can reuse it! I’m not writing wrong just because I didn’t write it at this moment! It’s called editing!
Like JEEZ! Writer’s block, burnout, and recovery are a long road with RIDICULOUS roadblocks along the way!
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2 Replies
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Hello Rena
I know what it’s like to suffer from a long block. I’m glad to see that things are looking up for “Steel Roses”. Good luck with it.
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Interesting one. Writing is a mental game. Sometimes, the act of jotting down a reasonable note-form first draft makes it hard to edit (‘I don’t want to mess with that beautiful phrase!’), sometimes an apparently equally half-assed first attempt virtually invites you to edit it into shape.
I’ve also noticed a similar phenomenon to Rena’s whereby I sometimes can’t edit a chapter ‘in place’ in the current draft, but if I start a new document called (e.g.) ‘Chapter 2 – v2’ and paste the relevant dog’s breakfast in, the edits flow like water and ‘this stuff writes itself’. It’s dumb isn’t it? – but the act of having the original version ‘safe’ somewhere else gives various misfiring neurons license to join hands and start making stuff up, apparently. I just go with the flow.
Good luck with the edits, and congrats on … how many novels? Power to you!
