Thread: Halfway through first draft..

.. And I've slumped. It's my first attempt at writing a fiction novel after years of poems and short stories, and an idea I've had bouncing around my head for about 2/3 years or so.

I put it down to a combination of factors (Being stuck on a scene whereby I need an inventive trap set by my main characters, living in hostels and hotels while travelling Vietnam, having a laptop which occasionally refuses to do anything), but the result is I'm not writing. I don't really want to say how long it's been since I've done any meaningful work for a consistent period in case I upset myself, but suffice to say it's been a while. I'll be back in Europe in a stable envioronment in the next couple of weeks, and the setting sounds ideal - I'll be at my girlfriend's family cabin in Norway. No Internet, no TV, no phones, idyllic scenery, fireplace. Just me, my rubbish laptop and three weeks of solitude.

Problem is, the novel has become such a big tangled weight I'm not sure where to start again with it.

I'm 60,000 words in. I love the story, I love the characters, and I reckon it could be a good little book once it's done. Problem is I'm terrified of not only self doubt about the finished product, a problem I'm sure is very common to read here (Am I doing the story justice? Am I wasting my time? Am I any good at this anyway?), but also how to jump back in. Do I:

- Go back and read everything I've already written to get back into the groove? It's an idea, but Stephen King says not to. (That's a half-joke, by the way.)

- Just plough on, and fix it all up in the second draft? (It's kind my style - I just write in the basics, and then review things such as description, conversational nuance, character details etc when the foundations are laid.)

- Drop the whole bloody thing, work on something else (Different genre, style, tense, whatever), and come back to it in a few months / years, when I'm more confident as a writer? This is something I don't really want to do in case I never return to it, but it's another option.

- Something else?

Any advice / thoughts would be appreciated. I'll offer some of my own on other threads in return.

Make a rule of sitting down for five minutes morning and afternoon and doing something to it. If after five minutes you are thinking of going for a pee/having a cup of tea/going for a walk, or whatever excuse it is you have for leaving it; leave it. Then come back for your next session and do another five minuets. At some point you will find that the five minuets extend themselves, with luck you might not be able to drag yourself away. Mind you, that sounds like much too nice a place to spend your time indoors writing.

Re-read the last few thousand words to get back into it, then plough on again. The middle is always hard to write, because your biggest milestone - the ending - is a long way off, and the beginning excitement has generally fizzled. Just keep on going, and you'll have got back into your stride and completed it before you know it.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

Make a rule of sitting down for five minutes morning and afternoon and doing something to it. If after five minutes you are thinking of going for a pee/having a cup of tea/going for a walk, or whatever excuse it is you have for leaving it; leave it. Then come back for your next session and do another five minuets. At some point you will find that the five minuets extend themselves, with luck you might not be able to drag yourself away. Mind you, that sounds like much too nice a place to spend your time indoors writing.

I think that's really good advice.

I also find that for me, it's very hard to concentrate on writing if I'm not in a stable environment. Getting back to Europe may be just the ticket.

Have you got an outline of the story already mapped out? If so maybe instead of having to concentrate solely on the scene that you're at now you can skip ahead and start writing one of the scenes later on in the novel.

This is one of the main reasons that I feel it's imperative to have an outline of the story you're writing (and one of the reasons why I enjoy writing screenplays). It's inevitable that at one point or another you're going to find the piece of work that you're writing a bit stale. It helps me immensely to be able to drop it and pickup another part of it that I'm excited about. I find that allowing that enthusiasm to be set free is both productive (I write the other scene) and contagious (I'm more motivated to go back and work on the original scene; or have had an idea triggered while writing that I can now use to overcome the hurdle).

So my advice, if you haven't already done so step back from the detail of the scene you're writing (and your specific problem of creating an "inventive trap") and take the time to brainstorm and put down a broader outline of your story.

If you've done this already, then skip ahead to something you're excited about writing and then come back to your issue later on.

A change is as good as holiday...

your first draft will be complete garbage

i've rewritten every single sentence in my second draft

for the first draft, i had an overall idea of where i wanted my book to go

but i believe that you will find out during writing a book, that it wants to be a lot different than what you originally had in mind before writing the first draft.

writing the second draft i really felt like i was really finding out what the book was about and started changing stuff.

after this, i plan on going over it, writing the main stuff on index cards and attaching them to a poster board with links between the cards. then i will probably add more index cards with stuff linking to the index cards i got from the second draft.

I will draw a big rectangle over a section of the posterboard and that is what will be in the book

i think this is a good way to have a lot of backstory without cluttering the book with too much stuff. also, i think this is a good way to not give the reader all the answers.

the 3rd draft will come from this posterboard and i think it will be only then that i know what this story really is or what it is about