Season of Doubt (#self-doubt #amwriting #wip)

I have reached that unpleasant stage in my current WIP— the stage when I start to question whether it’s worthwhile to continue to the end. Every time I finish a sentence, I feel as though I’ve written essentially the same one a hundred times before. I’m pushing so hard to get my characters to follow my plans that they’re starting to feel like manikins rather than real people.

I look at the book and think, who’s going to want to buy this? What is this, anyway? It’s not really romance—sure, my heroine’s going to finally get together with her true love, but right now she’s fooling around with the Devil. It’s not really erotica, either—many of the sex scenes are little more than hot snippets, intended to suggest a kinky relationship without my having to go into endless detail describing it. The book is part satire, part morality play, part guilty confession. Honestly, I don’t know what readers will make of it.

If I have any readers...

When I start to feel like this, I’m tempted to just stop. After all, why bother? However, I’ve written nearly 20K. No matter how bad it is, I’m reluctant to trash that much work (months, given the small amount of time I have to actually write). Plus, I know from experience that I frequently go through this sort of phase, what I call my “season of doubt”. Most of the time, I recover.

I wonder if other authors have the same experience. Some of my colleagues—the ones who put “USA Today Bestselling Author” on their covers—bang out one book after another. They’ve got a new romance title to flog every month or two. I can’t imagine they experience this sort of existential crisis with every novel. They’d never make their deadlines if they did.

As for me, I write mostly for the fun of following my ideas down the rabbit hole and the satisfaction of the occasional raves from my readers. So why can’t I just sit back and enjoy the ride? Why do I almost always get to this point where I’m so sure my stuff is crap that I’m almost ready to chuck it?

I really have no idea. I’ve felt this way even about the books that I later came to feel were my very best. I try to remember that, as I force myself to write on. I always seem to emerge from under this cloud of doubt eventually.

I just hope that happens soon with this story!

Back in the Saddle

It's been sitting on my hard drive for the past six months, gathering digital dust. I'm talking about my homoerotic scifi novel Quarantine. I wrote about a third of Dylan's and Rafe's story, and then, I lost confidence in my ability to create a plausible future society. The book takes place in the near future, after a sexually-transmitted plague has decimated the U.S. Homosexuality isn't just frowned upon, it leads to lifetime imprisonment in a quarantine camp. The book describes the struggle of two very different men for freedom to be themselves and love one another.

As I've written before, I think science fiction is one of the most challenging genres (although easier than historical). It simultaneously requires great imagination, in order to envision an involving and surprising other world, and the ability to make these imagined details plausible and internally consistent. When writing a contemporary story, one can let loose and focus mainly on the characters and their interactions. Writing scifi, in contrast, demands that the author devote constant attention to the premise, background and setting, as well as the emotional content. It's a far more cerebral process.

Anyway, yesterday I pulled the manuscript out of the digital drawer and started to work on it once again. When I froze half a year ago, I went to one of my favorite crit partners, who writes amazing speculative fiction, and asked for his help. He read what I had so far and asked a lot of excellent questions: why is this so? what is the underlying motive for this behavior? where did this detail come from? He also made lots of far out suggestions for where I might take the book - he's far more original than I am - but really, his questions were what helped me to figure out more of what the book needed.

I wrote a chapter yesterday, and I'm hoping to do at least two chapters a week from here on in. I've got a scene list/rough outline, although there are still some holes in my plot. I'm trying to trust that I'll figure out how to fill them when the time comes, and meanwhile, to move forward.

Yet happy as I was at my progress yesterday, I started to squirm with recurrent self-doubt. Would people really like this? Is it too obvious? Too shallow?

I'm not going to listen to those questioning voices. I'm going to push them aside and forge ahead toward my goal - a finished novel of 60-70K words. I haven't written anything long in nearly three years, and I'm eager to have the space for a more complex plot and more nuanced relationships than you can create in a short story or novella.

Yes, I'm back in the saddle again, and I'm not getting down until I get where I want to go!

Dirty Little Secret

From the outside, authors look like gods. They're blessed by the muses, continuously bathed in the font of inspiration. Words pour out of them to sparkle on the page like precious jewels. Contracts appear, one after the other. Titles pile up on their back lists. Visit many authors' websites and you'll see word count meters, where the author displays his or her daily or weekly accomplishments on various works in progress. Tens of thousands of words - hundreds of thousands - the mind boggles.

Some authors are so prolific, you really have to wonder whether they ever eat or sleep. Obviously there's something very special about someone who can generate page after page, story after story, and get them all published.

Well, let me share a dirty little secret. It isn't always like that.

Sometimes writing is like squeezing blood from a stone. It's an insidious form of self-imposed torture. The ideas blaze clearly in your mind. You know your characters inside and out. You're breathless with anticipation as they move closer to one another. You feel their uncertainty, their conflict, their need. You imagine the sweaty palms, the accelerated pulse, the damp scent of arousal. The only problem is expressing all this in words.

You write a sentence, then another, and notice you've used the same word twice in a row. After racking your brain for a while, you sigh and pull out the thesaurus to find an acceptable synonym. Insert synonym and pen another sentence. Oops, the structure is exactly the same as the first sentence in the paragraph, so it sounds stilted. Change things around. Transform a gerund into a subordinate clause. Swap the order of the clauses. Weigh the benefits of using the passive as an alternative to yet another sentence that begins with "She". And so on.

Experienced authors will tell you not to edit as you write, but sometimes I can't stop myself. The resulting prose is far cleaner than if I'd just let it rip, but it's a painful process that really kills spontaneity - not to mention productivity.

Yesterday was like that. I wrote all afternoon and produced only about two thousand words toward my goal of twelve thousand. Worse yet, I really didn't enjoy it.

I could see what I was doing. I tried to push my inner critic aside and just write, but the words wouldn't come. My normally broad vocabulary seemed to have regressed to sixth grade.

Thank heavens, writing isn't always like this. Lately, though, I've found myself so pre-occupied with craft that I know I'm stifling my creativity. It's really tough to control, however.

I've considered getting a bit drunk before sitting down to write. You know, lowering my inhibitions... But I never drink before 5 PM, and I normally write in the afternoons. What I really need is a different attitude. I need to stop thinking of writing as a responsibility and return to the notion that it's entertainment. The more "professional" I become, though, the more difficult it is to assume that perspective.

My time for writing is limited. My output is sparse compared to many of my colleagues at the best of times, so lately there's an edge of panic in my approach, especially when I have a deadline.

Not good at all!

I'd love to know how other authors deal with this problem. Because I'm quite sure that I'm not unique. Writing can be damned hard work. That's the dirty little secret that many of us try to hide.

The Critic Within

You've probably read blogs by other authors about dealing with negative feedback: rejections and bad reviews. I can confirm that it really doesn't matter how long you've been writing, or how many books you've published. Having work rejected still hurts, even if the editor softens the blow by telling me she actually liked the story but found it wasn't appropriate for the target publication. A negative review will put me in a funk for days—even when all my other reviews of the same book have been favorable. Either one can take the joy out of writing. For a little while, at least, I find myself thinking “Why bother?” We writers are sensitive folk.

There's something even more debilitating than negative feedback from an outside source, though. I'm talking about the internal voices who tell you that you're no good, that your writing is boring and pedestrian, that your characters are flat and your plots are limp. I don't know if all authors deal with these voices. I do know that I'd be far more productive without them.

Usually my inner critic is at her snarkiest when I am just about to get started on something new. I may be excited about my ideas and enthusiastic about diving in—then the internal monologue begins. Didn't you just read a story with a similar premise a few weeks ago? Why can't you come up with something original? Another romance about a reunion with an old flame? Ho hum. Male/male sex? Aren't you the copycat? Just jumping on the bandwagon just because everyone says it sells. Etcetera, etcetera, on and on, until self-doubt pretty much drains away my energy for writing.

I'm going through this right now. Total-E-Bound put out a call for holiday shorts and I thought I'd try to submit something. I've found in the past that having a release around the end of the year tends to translate into increased sale as well as giving me lots of fodder for blogging. I kicked around a couple of ideas and settled on a tale based very loosely on some personal experiences. It's supposed to be a M/M/F ménage about a busy career woman who hooks up with an old high school friend at a Christmas party, then discovers he's living with his male lover.

As soon as I sat down to write, the critic started nagging me. “Where's the drama in this story?” she complained. “These characters—they're just like anyone you might meet on the street. You call this guy a hero? He's only five nine, for heaven's sake! And this stuff about him being bisexual. Come on. Who's going to believe that?”

I resolved to ignore her and wrote my first sentence, my first page. The story begins with a kiss. All well and good. But then I have to introduce the characters and provide some information on their history, while trying to build the tension.

“Where's the sex?” my critic sneered. “You're nearly 3000 words into the story and all you've managed is a kiss?”

“Shut up,” I told her. “The sex is coming. I have to set the scene first.”

“Hmph. You're going to run out of word count before you get the guy and the girl together, let alone bring in his lover.”

“Leave me alone! I know what I'm doing!” I responded. But then I began to worry that she might be right. Maybe I needed to cut some of the back story. Maybe I should have started with the sex scene and then used a flashback to show how they got into bed.

No. I refused to let her influence me. I tried to reason with her. “Let me get the first draft down,” I said. “I can revise it later, if I decide the story needs to move more quickly.”

“You won't have time,” she told me sourly. “You'll end up leaving it as is and then you'll be sorry. The story will get a wimpy heat rating because it doesn't have enough sizzle. Maybe it will even be rejected. Or it will be accepted and then panned by the reviewers.”

“This is romance, remember?” By this time I was getting pretty pissed off with her nagging. “The relationship is more important than the sex. Now leave me alone and let me write.”

She threw up her hands and went off in a huff, shaking her head and muttering dire predictions. I've discovered that the only way to deal with her is to ignore her. I finished my chapter and decided to stop for the day. I knew that it would be easier the next time I sat down to work on it. Once I'm into a story, it begins to write itself, but the first few thousand words can be torture.

This happens pretty frequently—not all the time, but often enough that I'm pretty tired of it. I wonder if other writers have the same difficulties. The trouble is, I can't completely dump my inner critic. Sometimes she's right. Sometimes her comments lead me to revelations that greatly improve my tale. When she gets in a negative mood, though, she puts me through hell.

I guess it's like marriage. You take the bitter with the sweet. All I can do is keep writing and try to live with her.