Thread: Losing Steam

It's so frustrating... I get pretty far into a novel, and then at some point something clicks and I just can't keep plugging away at it anymore. This has happened twice now... the first one I got about 60K words into and all of a sudden, I just quit. I now haven't written any more on it in about a year. The second one is one that I was, up until recently, going strong on. I've got about 40-50K on it. But recently the words have just not been flowing like they were.

I just so badly want to finish something!

I don't know what to do, besides just wait it out and hope the inspiration returns.

I know how you feel vanishing spy. I am doing a lot better with it now though. My suggestion to you is to go back and read everything you have written, fix anything that might be wrong. It may help you get back into the mindset you need.

Inspiration is a lie. You need inspiration to start a story, to find the concept and the first character or three, but sooner or later you just have to put your head down and write whether you "feel like it" or not. Even if what you get is crap, it can be edited and improved upon later. But you won't get anything unless you start typing....

Now!

I think Vertigo hit the nail on the head. At some point, enthusiasm and inspiration run dry. That's usually when you hit the wall.

The only way to break the wall is to plow through it. Write, even if it's terrible, uninspired drivel. You're not writing to create fine art at that particular point. You're simply writing to get past the mental block.

Finishing a piece, be it a short story or a novel, is a skill all it's own, one that's different from beginning a piece. You're likely very good at openings and middles, but the Third Act is where the wheels seem to fall off for you. The only way to fix that is to force yourself to write through it.

Your brain may be shutting down because it's facing unfamiliar territory. So make the Third Act your regular stomping grounds! Get used to writing through it! Then, hopefully, your brain won't hiccup anymore.

I suggest you stop waiting for inspiration to return, for the words 'to flow', and instead treat it like a job: show up every day, write a few pages, clock out and 'go home', that is, go do something else.

It may not be fun at first, and you may actually begin to wonder why you are torturing yourself, but if finishing a story is truly important to you, you will find the determination to see it through.

Some people just don't have a novel in them. From what I've seen the people who do rarely need pep talks -- they just do it.

i'd suggest that you read the comments above and try to work out your priorities. then choose to either grow a pair or get out.

i don't wish to be unkind, i think anyone who's ever written or tried to write a novel can relate to your post, but the fact is this is not rocket science. it's only writing. sure, its not all that easy, but it isn't terribly hard either. the wording of your post suggests you're thinking of it in a way that is actually quite destructive. words like 'losing steam', 'going strong'...these words belong in the vocabulary of a marathon runner or mountain climber (and even then probably a pretty unsuccessful one). not a writer.

writers don't go strong, they just go until they finish or die or give up. there's no strength to the movement, the strength is in the movement existing at all. and writers don't run on steam, they run on sweat and blood and laughter and tears. you can't run out of any of those things. well, except blood i suppose.

point is, your complaint is not something anyone can or should help you with. just write the damn novel, or else let it go.

You can be the most creatively minded person in the world, and it's still an almost-certainty that you will come unstuck when writing a novel. It comes with the territory. If you want bad enough to finish it, you find a way to overcome these moments of self-doubt. You develop a stubbornness towards quitting. For me, it would be the thought of throwing away 60,000 words of prose. That would play on my mind and hinder me from writing anything else, forcing me to go back and finish it.

I like the answers I've gotten here. I re-read my original post and I realized it did sound very whiny and pointless. I wasn't really seeking an answer, or a pep talk, I just let my frustration momentarily get the better of me and I complained.

I actually have been writing through the novel, even before I wrote the original post, though I've been hating nearly every word I've put to paper over the last couple of weeks. I just find it odd -- sometimes I really like the characters and the plot and feel that other people would too. Other times I start second-guessing the whole thing. It just makes me wonder where that huge disparity comes from.

I will say that, logically, I don't romanticize the writing process as being an endless channel of intellectual and emotional fulfillment. But I do think that I maybe sounded like I did from my original post.

Maybe for me it has to do with attention span. I have the awful tendency to start to sputter out in the middle of a work and then I lose interest and move on to something else. That's how I've done with all my novels. The thing is, I'll come back to what I've written maybe six or eight months later, and it'll seem fresh and exciting again. The 60K word story I was working on about a year ago? I've been re-reading some of the chapters and I find parts of it pretty decent. It's very rough-around-the-edges, but I feel like there is a worthwhile story there. The problem is I just can't work like this... write something, get a pretty decent way into it, leave off and start something else. I know it's something I'll have to work out for myself, and that there is no magic piece of advice or solution that a forum member can tell me that is going to make the difference.

VanishingSpy, for what it’s worth, these days I mostly feel the same way you do.

And all those people who are forever saying something like “Just write!” should just once try sitting in my (our?) shoes to see what it’s like.

It isn’t possible to just write when one’s mind is empty. The teensiest amount of logical thinking reveals that the thought has to be antecedent to the deed, in other words, in order to just write, the words have to be in one’s mind first. If there’s nothing there, it can’t be written. I would dearly love to have a mind brimming over with ideas. But how? There’s the rub.

Originally Posted by James Scott Bell

Maybe you're sitting before a blank sheet or screen and there is nothing in your head. Zero. You've exhausted all your possibilites. You are a desperate writer.

Good. Many other great writers have shared your misfortune. And they have found a way out. The answer is just write anyway.

Before writing Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow was desperate. He explains, "I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in new Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another..."

You don't need ideas to write. You could write for 10 minutes describing a piece of lint on the carpet, or a dripping faucet.. anything to get your creative momentum going. At some point something will click and you'll begin to take it from there. Later on when you get to editing, you can go back and remove all the "random" writing, and it'll seem, to the uninformed reader, as if you're one of those lucky authors who never seems to run out of creative ideas! Little do they know..

The Curious Incident of the Lint on the Carpet ~ a novel.

Fair enough.

Lol!

Well, ideally at some point you'd start to branch away into something more interesting.

Sometimes when I feel I cannot work on my novel I will write about the characters but in a situation not likely to be in the novel. So for example, if my novel was about a criminal gang member, I might start writing about him being a charity worker etc, or at least doing something out of character.

Writing should not be about just working on a novel. I know that most, if not all, of what I write will never be read by anyone.

Originally Posted by KyleColorado

You don't need ideas to write. You could write for 10 minutes describing a piece of lint on the carpet, or a dripping faucet.. anything to get your creative momentum going. At some point something will click and you'll begin to take it from there. Later on when you get to editing, you can go back and remove all the "random" writing, and it'll seem, to the uninformed reader, as if you're one of those lucky authors who never seems to run out of creative ideas! Little do they know..

If it works for you -- great, but that's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Some people do need ideas to write -- and I'm one of them. For me, the process of writing has to be about a flow ideas -- what this character says or does next, or how something is described etc. They may not be BIG ideas, but they are ideas nonetheless. In my experience, churning out random writing makes things worse and is a huge waste of time.