Sometimes, when I approach a story, I can’t pin anything down. I flail, throw something on the page; I hate it, I grind my teeth, and then I do it again. Nothing sticks. I feel like a hack, but I keep hacking away because if I stop writing, then I’ve not written anything. As far as Things That Are Bad in the Writing World, not writing is the only thing that’s worse than being a hack. If you’re not writing, then you’re not a hack anymore — you’re not even writing, which is a Problem.
So sometimes, draft zero happens. And the results are often overblown, appalling, tepid crap. (At least with me. All of these writing posts are about me, even if I say ‘you’.)
I finished the zero draft of my newest story the other day, at 15k words. SERIOUSLY. It’s supposed to be a short story but I just couldn’t get my hands around it, and I overshot my target by 9,000 words. That’s a whole lot of flailing. I knew that I had to go in there with a machete if I was going to salvage it. So I did; yesterday I waded in, banged out 1,500 words that I thought were a nice improvement (but not great). This morning? I caught up on my Twitter, ate my breakfast. When I finally got down to it, I couldn’t write squat. And it was because I hadn’t killed enough of my darlings. I’d hung up the machete, and went with a whiffle bat instead. I was still twisting the same trap that had made me vomit up those 15k words in the first place.
Once I realized that I’d missed a few darlings, the first thing I did was get a headache. But then, the fixes also stood out like bland, over-described nails.
I ripped out a character, axed an entire location, swapped in a new personality for another character, and burned the main character’s original story arc to the ground. I opened a new draft folder inside my Scrivener project, and moved the previous draft to the trash. All of a sudden, the story is doable again. The impossible? Now possible.
The headache, though? That didn’t go away for a few hours. Little bastard.
