Writing Paralysis by Over-Analysis

In James Scott Bell’s new book on writing, Just Write, he has a whole section devoted to writer life. Flipping through, I found the header on writing paralysis caused by over-analysis.

Arguably, this is the reason why writing books aren’t great for me. While I love essays on writing, genre, and experience, books on the craft of writing have always frustrated me.

As I mentioned last week, one of my not-strengths as a writer (I still refuse to call it a weakness) is that I have a hard time stepping away to see plot structure and theme. While this was true in last week’s post on academic writing and analyzing others’ works, I also have a hard time doing it with my own writing.

This isn’t to say I’m bad at plotting. I love plotting. I love taking all sorts of characters and events, tying them together, stretching them over the course of a book, and feeling it balance. I say feeling because I can’t actually look at it and identify that it is balancing. I can, if given a theme, make twists and turns that fit it. However, I can’t point out the Dark Moments or the Reversals. Acts I-III still elude me despite learning them from multiple people and in multiple ways. I can’t identify which areas of my plot project fit a specific plot formula.

If you give me a writing craft book and ask me to plot the structure of a piece of fiction–my own work or even a famous example–to that craft structure, I just kind of glaze over. And, unfortunately, I feel begin to feel incompetent because of that (one of the many side effects to having low self-confidence is that I can’t actually recognize when I am doing well, especially in the face of a theoretical construct that is somewhat OFFICIAL or supposedly UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE).

So, at this point, I am making a choice. I am going to stop looking at the plot structures that “all stories have” and the formula for a successful story…and just keep writing. Because the writing paralysis really needs to stop.

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