Several months ago in an online chat server for my teacher friends, someone asked what everyone was up to that day, and I mentioned that I was "staring at my novel manuscript and trying to make myself write but knowing I will just stare at it for a few hours and then go back to dicking around on the internet". A couple of friends expressed interest in the story, so after re-reading the prologue and first chapter manuscripts which I had finished in the early 2010s (to make sure there were no egregious issues), I posted them in the chat. Those who read it responded favourably, and with that little dopamine hit, I went about my day.
But as I continued to shitpost on social media or whatever I was doing, I kept mulling over the chapters I'd submitted. I didn't make a conscious decision to do it, but every now and then I'd think, "This bit would be better if that character did this instead of that" or "I could reword this section slightly and then cut out a big chunk in a later section". I started off occasionally opening my novel manuscript to make those changes before closing it and going back to time-wasting, but gradually I found myself focusing only on my writing and completely ignoring everything else.
At first, the revisions I was making were fairly minor, mostly consisting of copy editing and sentence restructuring. As time went on, the revisions became more substantial. In addition to improving some of the existing work, I was able to add about another thousand words to my total, which hadn't really budged for the better part of a decade.
Then I received the Examiners' Reports for my thesis and had to focus my attention on that for about a month, during which time I injured my right wrist. In addition to being painful, this made everything take three times as long as it normally would. Between thesis revisions, assignment marking and novel writing, something had to give, and as frustrating as it was to stop writing when I was starting to get so many new ideas, I had to shelve my novel. Even once I submitted my thesis revisions and finished marking that batch of assignments, I had to spend a few weeks resting my wrist.
As of about a week ago, I was able to start writing again, and it was like a switch had been flipped. Gaps I'd left in my chapters in progress because I couldn't think how to bridge them when I originally wrote them were finally filled. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had numerous instances in my outline of things happening because I needed it to happen for the story rather than because it was a plausible or logical thing to happen, or things which I needed to happen in a later chapter but which couldn't happen because of something I'd written in an early chapter. For many of these, I suddenly had ideas to overcome these plotholes and come up with realistic explanations for why these things were happening. There were even some passages that I had originally thought were okay, but when I looked at them more recently with the benefit of more maturity, knowledge and experience, realised they were problematic and was able to rewrite them to remove the cliches and stereotypes and make the story stronger. In the last week, I've added another 4,000 words to my manuscript, and I still feel like I have plenty of momentum.
I'm sure I'll hit another wall soon enough, but until then I'm enjoying the process of getting the story out and watching the word count go up. Even though I haven't and probably won't show the later chapters to anyone for a while, it seems that having a few people express interest in the story was enough to show me that it does have potential and kickstart me into working on it again.
And now that I am finally a Doctor as of yesterday, there's one less thing to get in the way of me working on my creative projects.
DASW Word Count: 27,021
