Yesterday I managed to do really well not writing. I did, however, finally give in and sit down at my computer. I wrote a few words, deleted a few others, then decided I’d be better off just using the 15 minutes to make myself read what I’d already written, or at least the relevant parts of it.
So I did that instead. I timed it, too, so I didn’t try to cheat. I read on my Kindle, and I was obviously in a mood, because I highlighted massive sections for deletion and “fixing.” I put that in quotes, because it deserves to be in quotes. I don’t like editing my stories once I’ve moved on to other sections of the story*; it doesn’t often help strengthen anything and does quite often flatten everything, turning it dull and lifeless. (*I edit as I write. I don’t know if it can be called editing, but it’s an integral part of my writing process. I write from one scene to the next, in a very linear fashion, but I write scenes, paragraphs, and even sentences out of order, in a very non-linear fashion. Much the way I write my blog posts here.)
Hindsight tells me that if I would have deleted the last 2 to 4 thousand words, I could have written something else many times over in all the time I’ve wasted avoiding this book.
I just… don’t know where to go with this story. I’ve lost all enthusiasm for it.
I meant to read through what I’d written a while back and that never happened. I just haven’t gotten to it, but reading the story from the beginning and getting right to work on it afterward, with no wasted time between, is the only hope I have left for regaining any of that enthusiasm.
So using those 15 minutes last night to force the issue felt like the right move. I think it was. I’m thinking about the book again, and I’m ready to spend today’s 15 minutes going through those highlighted passages and making a decision about the direction of this book.