Experience strikes again

Twenty-three weeks after the first day of the second new year

It’s interesting, the way Author’s work on her next book for you has started. She has spoken in the past about the place of experience in the way you work on each one of your books, and in her post twenty-five weeks after the second day of the first new year of this blog she spoke about the need for you to be flexible in your work. This because as you move from book to book you gain not only the kind of experience that lets you know what steps need to be completed in order to get from each idea you have to its ultimate publication as a book and how to complete these steps, but also the ability to decide what order the steps and the tasks within them need to be completed in, or when to stop in the middle of a step and move to another, depending on the story and its needs, and on how it is most efficient for you, its writer, to do the work. With experience, you understand that the path to one book does not necessarily have to be identical to that of another, and that you need to be able to constantly assess where you are in your work and what’s best to do next.

In that same post, Author pointed out that with every book she has written, she has, in fact, strayed from the work process she had set out for herself in the previous one. She wondered how the way she works will continue to change, what her work process will be like in her next books. Wondered with curiosity, not concern, mind you. Her work has taught her that there is no one right way to do things. That flexibility is an asset, that she should allow herself to learn, to change, to decide based on the story she is writing at the time and her own capabilities. After all, there’s no hurry to finalize a work process, no hurry to set limits. Certainly no reason to stop listening to herself.

And this shows more than ever before in Author’s work on her next book for you. As she has told you in last week’s post, she has a preliminary draft for it. And at first she worked on it as always—she began her initial read of the story, to get back to it, so to speak, moving forward paragraph after paragraph, but found herself already adding, making changes, deciding on the chapter breakdown as she went along. And then she stopped, just a few chapters into the draft, put it aside and turned, instead, to work on the research for it, toward the completion of some details.

In the past, Author would have first gone through the entire draft before beginning to take care of the completing details at such an early stage. But this time it’s different, she already knows what’s bothering her and what will continue to brother her in future reads of this part of the story she has gone through, and she knows how her view of later chapters will be affected if she doesn’t already complete what she needs from these first ones now. Of course, Author won’t do all the research for this book at once, some will be done later on. She will only do what’s needed for her to make sure that that first part of the story has what it needs to be a strong, stable lead-up to the rest of it, a proper gateway. Once she has what she needs, Author will go back to the beginning of the story, start over, have a look at those first chapters again. After that, she will do whatever feels right for her to do next.

What about you? If you are working on your first book, or have just finished it, you still don’t feel the experience, the assimilation of knowledge and know-how, in a way that makes you comfortable with what you do. If you are in a later book, your third or fourth perhaps, and you took care to do things properly from the beginning, then you should feel it by now. No, it’s not second nature yet, but it’s there. It feels different, doesn’t it, from your hesitant work on your first book, when you felt so lost.

And if it doesn’t feel different three or four books down the road, if you see that you follow the same set of steps and tasks you’ve set for yourself when you were just beginning to write, if you don’t feel the confidence that gives you at least some freedom to decide each step or task based on a current assessment of your story at any point you choose in your work—within the general framework that needs to be completed in order to give the story and its readers your best, of course, if you still hesitate or proceed rigidly because you don’t feel confident enough in the knowledge and experience you’ve accumulated thus far, then stop and consider why. Is there anything about the way you work that doesn’t allow you to learn from what you do in a way that it will stay with you? Have you taken the time to understand what you do well and what you don’t? Did you make sure to learn what you don’t know, did you ask others where you encountered gaps in your knowledge you couldn’t close? Remember, don’t be afraid of what you don’t know, learn again and again until you do.

Knowledge that is clear in your mind is more likely to stay with you. It becomes the building blocks of your experience, which then becomes second nature, which in turn gives you the freedom to chart your own way.
And this brings Author to the end of this post, and to this week’s tip for you: there is no right or wrong way for you to make your thoughts into published stories, there is only the optimal way for you to do that, and to give your readers the best you can.

And one more word of emphasis: that freedom Author was talking about, it’s not the freedom to think that you can now stop looking for new knowledge, stop acquiring new experience, stop thinking how you can do things better. On the contrary, it’s the freedom to consider, assess, and proceed in better ways, and to turn that knowledge, that experience, and that thinking, into new habits.