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When There’s Nothing But the Blank Page
I’ve been pulling strings on this novel for a long time.
I’ve scrapped nearly 50,000 words so I could go back and plot out this novel. Get a really good idea of how to organize it. While I’ve improved by ideas on what this story will be, I still have some uncertainty, some hesitation, some primal fear that the ideas that I’ve come up with, the story that I’ve drafted, won’t do my characters justice.
But it’s come to the point where I’m using my plotting notes and, especially, my outline — a 5,100 word behemoth that doesn’t even cover the last act of my book — as a crutch. The process is stagnating. I’ve put so much into courting this tool that I’ve run the creative process aground.
Sometimes, it feels like so much of being a writer is identifying when this happens. Knowing when it’s time to stop doing something because it just isn’t working.
I still have a lot of doubts about this book. This will be my second novel, and I think back to my process of writing the first. It took years. As I started writing, I would get revelations about my story, about my characters. And I’d keep writing through. But, eventually, I’d accrue enough changes, enough ideas, that it made no sense to keep writing that draft — I might as well go back and start making all of these changes — over and over again, for years.
