Questions for people who have finished something

The Chatters
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I haven’t finished anything (drafts) longer than a short story in the past 12 years since the first ‘book’ i wrote as a kid. I think I can see myself potentially finishing a very rough first draft of my current WIP. Yet I’m so scared I’m going to let the doubt kick in and self-sabotage. It has me honestly feeling pretty overwhelmed and I just want to get some outside perspective/other’s experiences to help I guess reframe things for me a bit.

I’ll take any advice or motivational anything but here are some general questions of things I’m curious about.

  1. Did you feel discouraged at any point writing it?
  2. Was it hard to wait to edit until you finished? Or did you edit as you went?
  3. Once you started editing did you feel better about the story?
  4. Was editing overwhelming feeling at first?
  5. What made you stick with it?
  6. Were their points writing felt like work and discipline rather just fun?
  7. What did you wish you knew when you were writing your first books/first draft?
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Hmm, not exactly. I think the main reason why is because I plan out the entire plot before I even start the first chapter, so by the time I’m writing it I already know where to go.

I guess it’s sort of both? :woozy_face: I make minor edits as I go and the most I would do would be to move a few paragraphs from one chapter to the previous or next.

But if we’re talking like, actual full-on fine-toothed-comb editing, then I wait to finish the entire thing first.

Generally yes. Especially with older chapters that I haven’t interacted with in a while, I could be like hey, this isn’t too bad, and now I’m gonna make it better!

I guess it depends? I’ve only done a full rewrite for one of my series. It was a pain at first because I had to face the cringe, so I basically just deleted everything and started anew :see_no_evil:

It can be hard looking at really old and unpolished work and trying to edit it while dying of cringe—maybe thirteen-year-old me shouldn’t have been so… prolific—but it does get better.

The fact that nobody else can tell my story the way I do. And well, the motivation to see other people enjoy it too :slight_smile:

Oh yeah. I’m a very sporadic writer so sometimes I’d have all my creative juices flowing, and other times I can sit in the “perfect” writing environment and not have a single word come out. Sometimes I’d even finish with a negative amount of words :sob: but then I remind myself that I’m not a professional author and I can take as many breaks as I want.

Reading and consuming media for inspiration has also turned out to be very helpful, at times more helpful than I imagined at first!

Writing a full book is not like writing a short story. I can pants the latter but I have to plan the former, otherwise it’ll be a dumpster fire :ragejoy:

But on the plus side, you can always take down that dumpster fire and transform it into gold :sparkles:

The first drafts of my YA fantasy series were AWFUL. As in, I’ve tried to look at my old drafts but my brain would end up short-circuiting from how terrible it was :sob: so I took the whole thing down for a rewrite, which I didn’t do for three years, but now it’s back up and it’s been featured a few times by Ambassador-run profiles :smiley: so anything is possible :joy:

Good luck with your writing! And remember, the first draft will probably suck, but it’s easier to polish something than to polish nothing ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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I just keep telling myself this…like every day. I’ve realized even me writing a movie review to a friend takes like three edits of an existing text to make my chaos brain work in a way that other people will understand. I think i’ve shifted the problem from thinking I could write something good in one pass to just being mad how long it’ll be before I can real edit it.

I plan everything, I get working and then something just feels right, and it completely shifts everything and I’m just telling myself I’ll go back and fix everything to make it make sense later. But also pray that moment of inspiration was a good thing lol.

I like to tell myself that’s why I haven’t finished anything yet. Younger me was not equipped to make anything I could stand reading 6 months later. Apparently being young, sheltered and both literally and literarily inexperienced makes writing stories hard. Also imagine you’re only romantic experience being Twilight and you’re trying to write a fantasy romance book…the red flags.

Thank you by the way! I really appreciate this!

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Pretty regularly. The amount of difficulty I have with a project varies, some of them come out nice and quick, and others are more like trying to wrangle honey badgers. But minimum once per project I hit a block and the longer the block goes on the more I hate the project. Believe it or not this has actually gotten significantly worse the more I’ve written! But it’s fine, it’s a first draft, I hatelove it and then I fix it.

I write zero drafts by hand and that limits my ability to edit. Although with my last wip I did find myself re-writing chapters… can’t wait to have to re-write that one… but no, generally I prefer to truck through a zero draft all at once and then do developmental edits. It lets me have time to play around with characters and see out the whole plot/subplots and all that important stuff that I need to have a good feel for in order to make it work.

Not generally.

Also not generally. I know the story, I know what I want to happen and what I need to fix. It can be intimidating to send out beta copies but you kind of have to have thick skin if you’re an author.

Can’t imagine not doing it.

Oh yeah sure, I love writing but I’m also incredibly lazy and busy. It takes discipline to make time to write every single day instead of doomscroll. And sometime… I want to say last year or the year before? Anyways, sometime ago I hit a point where even though I was writing regularly, I wasn’t satisfied with my “skill level” (for lack of a better term) and the only option was to start studying writing and the things I wanted to write about. So, yeah, it’s work. But it’s work I enjoy.

Um, idk, I was like 10. Probably how to lock a word doc and not leave stuff lying around because i still hold a grudge about how openly disturbed my mom was about my writing :joy:

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I think I used to, once upon a time. These days I sometimes worry that what I’m writing won’t sell well, but it seems every time I think that, the opposite is true :smiley: So now I am more concerned about the ones I think WILL sell! :joy:

For me, no, but I know a lot of people struggle with their inner critic and it can be hard to silence that. There’s ways around it, of course - tools like Ilys (although they’ve gone a weird route, so I would advise just turning your document text into the same colour as the background) for example.

Most of my editing is just fixing typos or stray commas so I don’t really feel any kind of way about it. Sometimes I add in new lines. I have one project that needed completely gutting this year, and now I feel better about the direction of the project. :slight_smile:

It definitely can be! This depends a lot on how you tackle editing. For my own work, I use Prowritingaid to speed things up and it makes it a lot less daunting. :slight_smile:

With editing or writing? For me, both have the same answer: I need them finished to publish. No finished book, no publishing, which in turn leads to no income. I understand plenty of folks are not publishing, so this answer might not help, but I still figured I’d throw my 2c in!

Sometimes it definitely feels that way!! I find it’s better to set it aside for a while and do something else, if that happens. Write a different project, play a video game, have a day off to decompress and recharge. Whatever works.

It’s not gonna be perfect. I spent a long time chasing perfection and all it did was make my projects worse. Now that I’ve given up on that idea, I’m more productive, writing more things that I love, and enjoying it a hell of a lot more. :slight_smile: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, but when I started ‘seriously’ writing and considering the market, I struggled a lot. I was too hung up on what other people might think. Just remember it’s your book, your draft, your world - it isn’t going to suit everyone and it’s going to be flawed… and that’s the best thing it can be.

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☜(ˆ▿ˆc)

A little, but not overwhelmingly so. Thing is, I tend to fall in love with the characters and I’m so curious how it’s all going to come together plot-wise, so I have to keep going in order to find out.

I always edit as I go, and then edit the whole thing again once the draft’s done.

Yup! My brain keeps working on it subconsciously, so I think of things to add or remove to make the story clearer and better.

Nope, but I have a pretty good grasp of grammar, punctuation and spelling.

I read a lot – classics and NYT bestsellers mostly – and so many of them are absolutely terrible! Boring as hell or silly, or pointless, and I think to myself, I can write better than that!

It’s usually that way for me–like work rather than fun. I truly envy those people who can get in the zone and write happily for hours and hours and lose track of time, and think it’s fun. To me it’s more like that old saying about cutting open a vein and bleeding on the page. It’s wrestling with words and wishing I had a bigger brain.

I wish I’d put less pressure on myself and didn’t take it so seriously. The time to take it seriously is during editing, not while writing the first draft. I don’t bother trying to hit word counts anymore or writing every day or trying to write for a certain period of time. Too much pressure that just kills the creativity!

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clickity click

All the damn time! I get all sorts of ideas, there are some I ger excited about and figure out quickly, others that I just can’t quite put my finger on and they marinate in my head for years…then there’s the dreaded middle, where usually the fun part I’m excited about writing ends, and the serious stuff that needs lots of thinking begins.

It can be hard, yes :joy: especially if I get stuck at some point and have to go back and reread. I can very easily get caught up in agonising over a single sentence and not moving forward. It takes conscious effort to stop me from doing it. Typos and such, I’ll correct them as I go.

Yes, so much better. I have a couple of historical fiction novels, which were pretty good the first time round, but then I revised and expanded them and they got so much better. I also recently revised the first novel I ever completed and polishing it up really gave me a strong sense of satisfaction :relieved:

With my latest revision, it was a bit. It took me forever to finish it. I found that I couldn’t edit more than a chapter a day, because otherwise I’d get sucked into the story and not do much editing lol. Which I guess is not a bad thing? If it was so engrossing to read already? :woman_shrugging:

Just knowing that I have to finish it, however long it takes :woman_shrugging: with the editing, the story is already complete so that’s not so bad. With my latest revision, the editing took up a lot of my time from working on my WIP, so towards the end I pushed through, just to free up my time. With writing…usually wanting to see something through is motivation enough. With my WIP I’m lucky in a way that its prequel did moderately well on Inkitt, and I know there are one or two people looking forward to the sequel. That’s pushing me to make it the best it can be.

Yeeessss. See “the dreaded middle” above :joy: I’m not one to plan my story out in detail, I find it very restrictive. I’ve got a concept, some scene and character ideas, and a flexible notion of the ending. The fun part is usually at the beginning, laying out the groundwork. Then by the middle, I have to start making some sort of outline, to keep track of all the clues and subplots. It then can take a lot of intention and discipline to see the story through to a thematically appropriate end.

I don’t remember where I got this quote from, but basically the first draft is you telling the story to yourself. This has been true for me. During this year’s revision, I realised that young me had a good head for story, but I overexplained a lot, it literally was like telling the story to myself. So you just gotta get that first draft out, however messy or ugly, and then you can focus on making it pretty. You can always edit a bad page, but you can never edit a blank page :slight_smile:

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For the examples, I’m using Lunar Heart, Shadow Bound (LHSB) (YA Fantasy at an editing standstill) and Between Roses (YA Fantasy self-published).

The first draft of LHSB I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2016, and Between Roses was NaNoWriMo 2013. So, since I’m a pantser, I never feel discouraged writing it because I know I can do whatever I want with it. It’s very freeing for me to just go for it. Wing it. Maybe even write complete and utter chaos. Be unhinged? Why not? I’m completely in control, so, no, I’ve never felt discouraged writing them.

I’m a pantser, and so, for first drafts, I don’t edit while writing, and it’s the way I’ve always written. Editing me will figure out what works and what doesn’t after the first draft is done.

For LHSB, yes, for the first self-edit. Then I got LHSB professionally edited, and then I had to rewrite it, and then I had to edit it, and then I went back and forth trying to come up with the perfect beginning. Now, well, it’s at a standstill. I’ve lost the plot :stuck_out_tongue: Long story short, I thought I felt better until I got it professionally edited. I started second-guessing myself.

But the professional edit was worth it because I realized I was not very good at showing character motivation.

Between Roses was a different story when it came to editing. I self-edited after getting reader feedback. Back and forth, back and forth. I just used beta readers. I also edited without the intention of self-publishing, at first. I did it slowly, over time. Honestly, this book turned out so much better than LHSB (got some five star reviews on Goodreads :grin: ) and I still need to figure out why :stuck_out_tongue:

I actually enjoy editing after the first draft. In fact, I’ve always enjoyed editing, period. Yeah, it might be stressful and tedious… but I come out of it at the end feeling 100% accomplished and satisfied. Maybe I enjoy editing because it feels like a puzzle and I love puzzles. I get to figure out what works and what doesn’t, reorganize my chaotic writing, and add in bits and pieces of lore to fill in plot holes. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle :grin:

But yeah, I do get tired of it and have to work on a first draft of something for a while before I can do more editing.

I usually stick with something because I’m stubborn and don’t like leaving projects (with setting and characters I enjoy) unfinished. It bugs me. I will be returning to LHSB next year. Fresh start.

Between Roses, I stuck with it because I just genuinely enjoy the story. I love it, and so, I wanted to return to it and make it as great as I could on my own.

It’s always been fun and discipline :grin: It’s always been me, pushing myself, stressing myself, and wallowing in my own misery. I’m just so determined to make a book. Between Roses proved to me that I can, indeed, make a book through sheer stubborn determination :stuck_out_tongue:

Hmm… probably “if you like it, other people will, too”.

It’s something I saw someone post on Instagram four, five years ago. It’s related to not being able to please everyone. Basically, you aim to write “a book you love”.

Because, think about it, there’s people who love the same movies you do, the same songs you do, and the same books you do. So, if you love your story, there should be people who love it as much as you do, right? :blush:

I wish I had this mindset of “if you like it, other people will, too” or “write a book you love” early on". There’s an unfinished novel I wrote over 15 years ago. I used to like it, but then I started stressing about writing a book other people will enjoy. I stopped enjoying it and started cringing about it instead. It will never see the light of day.

Between Roses is a story that I love. I really enjoy reading it and sometimes I’m surprised that I was the one who wrote it :stuck_out_tongue: It’s so weird.

Writing this all out made me realize what I need to do for LHSB’s fresh start next year. I need to find the love in it.

Thank you for asking these questions :grin: I hope my answers are helpful in some way. Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you have them.

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I’m so worried about this. I know it’s going to take a lot of work to get something up to my standards and I’m not prepared to be told it’s not.

I think I really enjoy helping others edit. Or trying to redo something I’ve worked on years ago because I know I can improve it. But stuff I just wrote I have a lot of trouble.

I think this is how I feel? I can’t stop thinking about it and how much I want to do it and I feel like I’m happier when I’m actively writing. Yet, when I actually set down and start typing it feels like work.

I am 100% working off of this vibe.

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Maybe try not to worry too much beforehand? I know that’s easier said than done, but you won’t know what will happen until you get there (something I tell myself a lot because I worry in advance all the time).

Are you thinking of one day getting a professional edit done? Are you thinking it might be mentally hard to get edited? While that’s true, and you do have to say “okay, trust the pros and soak up feedback like a sponge, don’t argue back”, the second-guessing part depends on you.

I started second-guessing myself, but that was all me. I wasn’t second-guessing the quality. I was second-guessing what story I wanted to tell. Like I said, I lost the plot. I had too many different ways I wanted to tell the story, and overwhelmed myself.

The editor did a really good job and she didn’t just edit. She also gave praise :stuck_out_tongue: It wasn’t all bad.

Maybe you need time before editing? I don’t edit right away. Sometimes I don’t edit for an entire year even. It does help to go back to something after some time as passed. It’s like my eyes are fresh again.

You said you’re happier when you’re actively writing. Do you mean you think you would feel happier? But then when you sit down, the joy goes away?

I’m curious… why does it feel like work to you? Do you do writing for work as well?

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I’m overall in my life happy and generally I do enjoy writing to a certain extent just not the way I used to.

The short answer is it’s hard.

The full answer is a little more complicated. Several years of bad mental health combined with bad work life balance and energy issues turned to many long periods of not writing at all. Honestly, just not doing any hobbies. Now I’m actively trying to change that but me doing anything that isn’t sleeping, going to work, dissociating for 8.5 hours of mind-numbing factory labor, eating and doom scrolling just feels like work. The active effort of just doing the thing when I’m tired and not used to it can be a lot.

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Girl same, I wasn’t the most sheltered but I hadn’t read much. My parents didn’t like buying me books and had admonished me for reading instead of studying in the past. I had to rely on my schools’ libraries, which had extremely limited selections, and a regional version of Apple Books that only showed stuff in the public domain. I legit went broke a couple weeks into my first semester on campus because I was so excited to finally buy books :sob:

But hey, better late than never. You got this :fist: and you will finish your first draft :triumph:

You’re welcome, and good luck on your writing journey! :smiley:

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I see… Yeah…doing writing when you’re tired can really zap creative energy out of you. I’ve been there. Not mind-numbing factory work, but just exhaustion from a cold, from unknown things at work, and just life.

So, I try to make it fun for myself. Idk if this would work for you, but here’s some things I do:

1: Make it a game. I try to get a round number word count each time I work on the story (I like doing this when I’m not in the mood to draft a story. Don’t think just write words.) So, I aim for anything ending in the 5 times table. I add five words little by little. Usually I end up getting competitive with myself, wanting to make the next count.

2: Not work on the story I’m working on, and write whatever comes to mind even if the writing isn’t that good. I have this ongoing collection of silly stories that I write whenever I don’t feel like writing or editing other things. I don’t think about if it will make sense or if anyone would ever read it. I just write. And that’s how I got a short story about a world where hamsters become currency.

Anyway, if you need time to ease into writing, know that it’s okay not to rush into it if you’re not ready to do it yet. Writing will always be there waiting for you :blush:

Oh, and Wackies will always be here if you need to talk it out :wink:

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