Reconnecting with your WIP

Via Jane Friedman’s blog: How to Reconnect with a Draft You No Longer Want to Write

I bet we’ve all slogged through a draft without being able to trigger “flow.” Not the fun way to do it. Slow, painful, even scenes you want to write are hard and the ones you just need to get through are worse. Ugh. This is what I’m thinking of when I see the title of this post. Is this what the post is actually about?

There comes a moment in many writers’ lives, sometimes early, sometimes much later, when the manuscript they once felt passionate about suddenly falls silent. You open the file and feel … nothing. Not dread, not excitement. Just a dull, gray emptiness. It’s not “writer’s block”—it’s not that you can’t write. It’s that you don’t want to. And in many ways, that feels worse.

I doubt very much that it feels worse than writer’s block, but this is pretty much what I had in mind. The rest of the post offers reasons this can happen and suggestions for getting through this feeling:

1) Burnout.

Yes, I should think so. How to get over that? Here’s the brief version; click through to read the whole thing.

First, give yourself full permission to pause without guilt. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a (creative) necessity. What about this story excited you when you got the idea? Reconnect with these feelings.Reread a scene or chapter you loved. And when you do start writing again, do it gently: set realistic expectations and honor them.

I strongly suspect the first point is the key. This is one reason I’m taking it easy this month, making time to read as well as write. I also think maybe it might help to ditch the project that slowed way down and got unfun — if possible — take a break, and pick up something else, something that feels more fun. Setting aside a project might be impossible, of course, and in that case there’s nothing to do but keep moving

Oh, here’s another one that rings a bell:

3) The WIP needs incubation time.

If you can’t write forward, write around it. Write about your character’s motivations, fears, or their backstories. Incubation thrives in unstructured thought. Take a walk, do dishes, stare out the window. Track your sparks: Keep a notebook handy for sudden lines, images, or plot fixes that drift in. Incubation often delivers gifts in flashes, and your job is to catch them.

Some of the other points look potentially useful as well. Basically, a good post with suggestions that seem as though they might be helpful.

Though I’m REALLY HOPING my next novel goes zipping right along. I don’t necessarily expect ever to complete a novel as fast as I did MARAG — eighteen days — but I sure am hoping the next one triggers flow and the novel pours itself onto the page. Each novel is so different. They’re hard to predict.

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