Feelings of failure (and what I plan to do about them)

When I was young, I always knew I'd have some sort of day job in addition to whatever creative hobbies I pursued, but one expectation I had was that I would have a published book by the time I was 30, even if it was only released as a self-pubbed eBook. But my 30th birthday came and went (quite a few years ago) and not only had I not published anything aside from an illustrated children's book I made for an elective in my Honours year (which I published through Blurb as a PDF and printed book but which seems to have been removed from the site), but I hadn't even finished writing a single novel draft.

With my 40th birthday less than 2 years away, I can't help but feel that time is running out. That if I haven't finished a manuscript by that point I should give up on writing entirely. I know this isn't healthy, and I've been trying to avoid this self-destructive mindset (it's not just writing, but even with exercise and diet, I sometimes find myself thinking "Well, I failed this week, might as well not bother trying anymore") but as more time passes, I find it harder to feel confident that I can actually finish a story.

Then again, I look at how GRRM still hasn't finished The Winds of Winter even though he's ostensibly been working on it for 13 years. I figure if such an established and experienced author is having so much trouble finishing a book, then I shouldn't feel too bad about not finishing my manuscript yet after starting it in late 2010, especially since I spent the last decade dicking around doing a PhD.

Still, I don't want to end up in my rocking chair 40 years from now regretting that I never managed to complete a story, so I need to work out how to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm never going to be as prolific as someone like Stephen King, who sometimes cranks out multiple novels a year, but I can aim to at least finish my standalone novella, and then maybe one of the trilogies I've planned out.

Now that I have my spreadsheet to track word counts and so on for each chapter, I'm hoping to be able to set more concrete goals for writing. As with my thesis tracking spreadsheet, I've colour-coded the chapters based on their state of completion. My brain seems to need a bit of visual help to comprehend things, so this should help me understand at a glance what I need to prioritise.

As mentioned in my previous post, I've got the start and end of the novella finished, and a small section of the middle more or less complete, but everything in between and either side of it is just fragments. Those complete or near-complete chapters can act as scaffolding for some aspects of the rest, but there are still quite a few plot points I need to resolve before I can connect all the chapters smoothly. This week I have been going through my manuscript and doing some edits, including changing some character names I didn't like (I thought they were cool when I came up with them more than a decade ago but re-reading them now makes me cringe) and tightening up a few waffly sentences.

In the past, I have tried setting daily word count goals, which has worked well for me for academic pieces such as literature reviews (as that's more of a slog through outlining work that's already been done) but not so much for writing stories (where you're essentially creating something out of nothing, something that has to be enjoyable to read as well as functional). In light of that, my strategy this time will be to set deadlines (eg. September 2024) to try to have a particular chapter draft finished. This will help me to have some focus without jumping around the entire novella but still give me some leeway in terms of how I put together each individual chapter. I'll see how that goes for a while, but if I don't make any significant progress, I'll try a weekly word count goal.

Anyway, it seems I will have a little more time for writing in the near future. I was expecting to get my thesis examination results sometime in the next week or two, but today I found out that one of my examiners has requested a one month extension. This means I won't hear anything for at least 5-6 weeks (if not more), so aside from spinning my wheels and keeping up with teaching work (which will also be relatively light until halfway through the semester, when assignments start coming in to be marked), I won't have much to do other than write.

Trying to get organised

Since my last post, I've mostly been preparing and revising teaching material for my classes, but I have also been making more of a concentrated effort to be creative. The first thing I did was block out time in my calendar each week, for art and for writing. One of the biggest challenges I had with writing was finding time to do it, as whenever a pocket of spare time presented itself to me, I'd always find an excuse or something else to do instead of writing. I didn't do a lot of writing this morning as I was recovering from yesterday's 8am class start time (I am decidedly not a morning person), but in the afternoon I have dug up a spreadsheet I started making several years ago with the structures and word counts for my WIP.

About a third of my chapters for that novella are complete or close to complete (pending any revisions once I get feedback on the drafts), another third are about half done and the final third have little to nothing written for them. Having numbers and charts like this helps me visualise progress - I found a similar spreadsheet useful for keeping track of progress on my PhD thesis chapters - and also see what needs to be done next. Between my word count totals and my chapter outlines, I'm hoping it will help me refamiliarise myself with my manuscript so I can start working on it again. After being forced to discontinue my PhD for almost 4 years, it took me a good 6-12 months to immerse myself in my research again and get to a point where I could move forward, but since I'm more interested in my novel than I was in that research project, I hope it won't take that long with my creative writing.

I've also been going over my outline for the chapters as well as the overall word counts. For the few chapters I've finished or almost finished (at the start and end of the book, with a few in the middle), I'm mostly happy with the contents, though there are still a few placeholder notes I wrote to myself more than a decade ago pointing out things that needed to be expanded or corrected but which I never got around to doing. But for the chapters that have almost nothing written in them, going back over the outline now reminds me why they have almost nothing written: because the outline for those chapters is either vague or contains events or plot points that are based on characters doing things Because The Author Needs Them To rather than because the character would logically or plausibly behave that way.

While I can continue refining the chapters that already have some substance, I think I am going to need to work out these plot kinks before I can make much progress on writing new material.

Getting back on the writing wagon

I've been interested in writing for as long as I can remember. Even in grade 5, my teachers would groan when creative writing assignments would be due and I'd hand them a half full exercise book as opposed to the 1-2 page efforts submitted by my classmates. In high school I'd write my stories in larger exercise books and after I'd finished each chapter, would pass them around to my friends, who would read it and then give it back the following week, along with feedback and demands for me to hurry up and write the next bit.

After high school, I did a diploma in writing and editing, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My favourite classes were the creative writing workshops. Being able to get feedback (regardless of whether it was positive or negative) from other people who actually knew about writing was encouraging and helped me grow as a writer. After I finished that course, I swapped into a degree in Information Technology, and though I still fiddled with writing occasionally, I didn't write as often as I used to (though in the final year of my undergraduate, I did come up with the idea for my current WIP (a fantasy novella whose current title is taken from lyrics to a song that inspired the story, which means I'll need to change it at some point to avoid legal/copyright headaches; the initials of the title are DASW), which I worked on solidly for a few years, resulting in about 22,000 words of the story being written). Once I started my PhD, my writing slowed to a trickle and then eventually stopped altogether as I became too busy and burnt out from academia to do anything more creative than doodling on the notepads in my retail job.

Having finally submitted my thesis earlier this year, I've been trying to get back into writing, with the goal of actually finishing my WIP. So far it's been a colossal struggle; all I've managed is to open my outline or manuscript, stare at it blankly for a few hours and then close it again. It's a bit like picking up a video game you were halfway through when you haven't played it for several years; you can't remember what you were doing, so you don't know what you're supposed to do next. It also seems like all the writing communities I used to be active in back in the day have died; there was a hashtag on the birdsite called "ROW80" where people would see how many words they could write in stretches of 80 days, and while the hashtag used to act as a watercooler for writer folks to gather around, it mostly seems to have died off; in the last few years there are only a handful of posts with the hashtag, and they're pretty much all just links to blog posts rather than actual conversations. I used to also join in NaNoWriMo each November and briefly considered starting that again, but noped out of there quicksmart when I saw how problematic they had become (or maybe always were). I've tried finding other writing communities on emerging social media sites, but the ones I've come across either seem cliquey or like everyone is just shouting into the void without really engaging with one another.

Not having a group of other writers to engage with has made it a little harder for me to get back into writing, I think. That feeling of needing to 'update' other folks with my writing progress helped me to actually make progress, as it put pressure on me to write regularly so I would have something to write about in my blog posts. With that gone, I've decided to start writing this blog; even if no one reads it, I'm hoping that having something to post updates on will give me some incentive to start writing again and keep writing.

At this point I don't know how active I'll be on this blog (especially given semester 2 at uni starts tomorrow and I'm expecting to have to make some revisions to my thesis once it comes back from the examiners). Some might think I'm using it as a tool to procrastinate from doing actual work (and they'd probably be right). If I do keep finding useful things to put on it and people actually start reading it and finding it interesting, I may move the blog to WordPress (either as its own blog or merge it with my existing art blog) and put my actual name on it, but for now it's just somewhere for me to ramble about my writing (or lack thereof).

DASW Word Count: 22,131