"Um...yeah...I was going to say words." No that's not a piece of dialogue, it's something that I say whenever I've forgotten something. As I start to work on a draft of Troubleshooter the new quote is "um...yeah...I was going to write words." It's amazing how much you can forget when you feel like it. When I was writing the first draft of Guardians (and which is by no means done) I remember taking forever to finish. But I thought that the slowness was my lack of discipline. Turns out it's because I don't know what to write. Recently I read an interview with an author who said that for a period of six months he wrote for 4-5 hours a day. My first thought was: how does he have enough to say. True, the author went on to add that he didn't like anything that he wrote but still. He was able to write for 4-5 hours in a day.
I'm stuck. The honeymoon stage with Troubleshooter is over in some ways. The initial excitement has faded and now I have to peel back the layers of this story and figure out what I've got. Quite frankly the answer is that I have no clue. And it's not that I'm afraid of failure, I've written enough crap to know that eventually you will produce something decent. It's more that I don't remember how I finished a draft last time.
When I finished the first draft of Guardians I thought that even if I wasn't a perfect writer at least I had an idea of how I functioned as a writer. The next time, I reasoned, I would be able to avoid the wasted time I spent staring at a blank page. Apparently every story is its own beast. And the only solution is to keep working until this process also becomes a pleasant memory.
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