Preemptive Retaliation

I watched a video the other day about how to stop doomscrolling and how to use your time effectively – and you know, I could spend a lot of time talking about the irony of that video, posted on a pseudo-social-media website, posited for clicks and views, recommended to me by the almighty algorithm, directed and produced in such a way that it is as long as it could possibly be, with many aching pauses and speech affectations to eke out the longest way possible to tell this story, yes I could spend some amount of time talking about that – but anyway, it was talking about how you could use your time more effectively by creating something. Just creating.

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I started this post a few weeks ago, got one sentence/paragraph in and then dropped it. Now I’ve lost the thought that spurned it, so I’m continuing on with another in its stead.

I’m having a hard time creating just now. It started, god, maybe two months ago now. I’ve been editing the first draft of my novel at a steady pace, and I was really enjoying the process for the most part. I got stuck here and there, but otherwise it was a progression. That was until I hit a chapter that lasted two paragraphs before disappearing entirely, and I realised that I have to actually write the chapter. This is usually something I love doing – unabashedly, one of my favourite parts of writing is when I get to create, where I can discover what I’m writing as I’m writing it – but it’s different this time. This time I have chapters that follow it, several chapters, in fact, and now I have the difficult problem of trying to find a route from A to Z without going completely off course through the middle. As such the chapter turned into an eight thousand word chapter, which doesn’t makes sense for where it is, and so I’ve split it in two but one of them is still pushing six thousand and I haven’t even started the second yet. And so writing it is a slog, and if writing it is a slog then reading it will be a slog, and this knowledge causes little stresses on my ego, little microfractures that make me doubt myself and the work until the whole thing crumbles under its own weight.

And the solution to this is simple – cut it. Cut out chunks of it, swaths of it, only keep what’s interesting and relevant and throw the rest away. But then there are pacing issues, and what I need to convey for the story to send its message. And then there’s the fact that I’ve already written this chapter twice already, you’re telling me I need to go over it a third time?

Yes, this is part of being a writer, this is part of the job, but it still sucks. It sucks that I have to go over everything again and again. It sucks that every time I do so I start losing any sense of what makes my stories any good, and so I don’t want to engage with the whole process. It sucks that I don’t want to do it, and so avoid the task until I force myself to at eleven at night when I want nothing more than to sit and doomscroll on my various attention sucking apps.

Sometimes I feel as though this blog is a way of me shouting into the void, of ranting about whatever bothers me and, in the act of writing it, discover that it’s not as bad as I think it is and I should stop whining. Rubber ducking myself, essentially.

But not this time. Right now, writing sucks. It’s hard, and boring, and I hate it I hate it. I hate my stupid book and wish I had never wrote it, and instead I could start working on another project and forget all about this one.