Pitfalls

There are two huge issues that I deal with when I’m writing, both of them dealing with me thinking too much.

One happens immediately after I finish a story. Every story starts off as an idea in my head. I know, you’re shocked. The process of the story going from my head to the computer is not a perfect process. As a result, the completed product rarely matches up to what was in my head. Most of the time I can make peace with this. Obviously, I have to. It’s never going to match up, no matter how good I am at the transfer.

But sometimes the end result is so jarringly off that I disregard the store and shove it into the trunk and never think about it again, if I can help it. Which is bad. Just because it doesn’t match the magical picture in my head, doesn’t mean it’s not good. Or that I can’t shape it into a better representation of its Platonic Ideal.

The second pitfall is really more for longterm projects. The longer I work on a given story, the more likely I am to think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever written. Which usually ends up with me scrapping the whole project and moving onto something else. Which is annoying, because unlike most unsuccesful writers, I don’t even have a shitty finished novel buried in the attic, I just have pieces of several shitty novels.

Really, the best solution to both of these problems is heavy drinking and sulking, but that doesn’t lead to much getting done.

So that leaves just barreling through it.

And sulking about having to do that.

Dylan Charles