Thread: You ever psyche yourself out while writing?

I'm busy (almost) every day working on revisions, and have an upcoming deadline this fall which is hanging over my head.

I'd love to slow down and revise the revision more, really go through it, but I'm feeling the pressure to keep working in a forward momentum. It feels exactly like trying to walk backwards on an escalator. You WANT to go back and slow it down but the thing just keeps on trucking right along...

I'm noticing this more and more now that I'm past the "beginning" stage and really knee deep in the project's midsection, literally clawing through 800 - 1000 words at a time. I think this'll pass once I bust through the midsection and start getting closer and closer to the ending but for now and the next month or so... well, this is the hardest part of the project for me.

Anyone else experience something similar?

I wish I had that problem.

I psyche myself out in a different way.. I start a piece, then become unhappy with it after 1,000 words or so, and throw it away. Then I start something else, and do the same thing, until my workstation is littered with the corpses of young stories. And the smell in the air is that of failure. I've yet to ever get to the "middle" of a serious work.

So, in comparison, I'd say your problem doesn't sound too bad. I would suggest you just keep moving forward, if that is how it seems to be going, and let the process unfold naturally. Sometimes the best writing comes from forward momentum, and not from edits or revisions.

With my novel, which started out as a short story, the hardest part has actually come at about the 100,000 words mark and near the end. I am well past the beginning (of course) and even past all the set up and the first, mini-climax of the book which sets up the ending. Then ending is already written too. But the problem is what is happening between that first mini-climax and the ending climax of the book.

When I sketched it out it seemed so simple at first. But when I compared how many pages of actual text came out of a similar number of notes and plot points I was looking at adding another 75,000 words to the book which would make a novel about 175,000 to 200,000. Needless to say that is really long I think. Not wanting to make it two books I headed back and re-hashed out that segment of the book. I dropped whole segments of plot which I decided were unnecessary and perhaps even redundant. Now I am plugging through that section. And I keep catching myself going back to thing I had decided to drop and forcing myself to stick to my new, shorter, path of plot travel to get to the end (making the book about 125,000 words total).

Honestly I cannot believe in that in a month and a half I got that far plus have two short stories ready for editing and a third with the opening scenes written and ready to be completed.

Yea I can relate to that. How much time do you spend writing a day, or what's your average word count/goal? It must be a fair amount higher than mine, and i already think I'm going too fast.

Also Kyle, i'd say you just need to keep plugging away. I bet not all those 1000 word drafts were worth throwing away. Form and craft matter more than concept, there's not a single story idea in the world that can't be made into a compelling work.

I write when I write. It is just that simple. I have never been able to force myself to write on a set schedule for a set amount of time each day. When I have done this for other endeavors I always turn out what I think is utter crap. But I do force myself to do something at least writing related every day.It may be actual work on a project, free writing, developing writing prompts, researching possible places to submit my work, reading historical texts to help me understand the way things like a trebuchet actually works so that when I write about one I understand it, etc.Usually when I work on stories I put down about 5 to 20 pages (standard novel layout) down for whatever story/stories I am workin on that day. The words come out usually pretty fast.

A fictional William Forrester once said, "When you write, you don't need to think. You just write. Thinking comes later, when you edit."

When I have this sudden urge to write, I just write. If my muse decides on a three-day spree, then I just oblige her and keep at it. Inspiration rarely comes to me, so I spring on it at every opportunity. True, I write some poems and a few short stories on a relatively regular basis, but I've never had a complete novel in months. My last novella was finished about a year ago, and I had not written since.

Having said that, if you have the momentum going, then let it keep on moving. Finish the story, the revisions will come later.

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I don't think I could work under the pressure of a deadline.
I did it in school, but that was research papers. Cranking them out wasn't tough. (pick subject, find 5-10 books of information compile information
and meld it into a report.) I admit I shirked my reports so in the end the teacher said if I can submit 4- 500 word reports of the quality I did when they were due,
he would give me a passing grade. I submitted 5 to be sure. I had three weeks. Normally we had to turn one in every other week.
But to keep a story going, and be interesting I don't think I could work under it.

Currently there is 15 abandoned books in a flash drive(computer killed by lightning, always back up somewhere.)
3 books I need to edit, working regularly on two or three books currently.

The abandoned books might get my attention again, most were abandoned because I had a story that demanded my attention more then
the others.
This is the first time I am working on two books equally. I work on one at work during lunch and breaks, the other at home.