Transitional States

I gots me some itchy writin’ fingers.

Now is that weird part. Almost a post-partum depression part. You spend every day going back to the keyboard and slugging away at some titanic thing that goes on for hundreds of pages. Eventually, to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed or depressed, you just stop thinking of how many pages there are left and keep your head down, concentrating on the particular thing you want to write Just That Day. And then gradually, it becomes an ingrained habit that of course you’re supposed to sit there and write.

And then one day it’s all over because you have finished it, and even though at the start, it felt like it would never get done, because it was, after all, hundreds and hundreds of pages, you are actually done. You’ve written a ton of story.

But at least for me, the part of my brain that I had to kick into gear in order to finish it, the one that drove back to the keyboard again and again everyday, has not yet wound down, and there’s an itch in the back of my head that feels like it should be writing more of the novel, even though every other part of the brain is saying, “The damn thing is done. There is no more new story, only rewrites.”

I think this is why a lot of writers reccommend not tackling anything–even the book itself–for a while once you’ve finished, to deny temptation the chance to simply write more things in just for the sake of writing. You need to get into a different mode for editing, because now you want to see what you can lose, see what you can sharpen, see what you can a little more nimble because you just wanted to get the idea out before you lost it, and the first pass was a clumsy, ungainly thing. Though writing a little more here and there definitely helps in that respect, going into a rewrite and finding your word count going up instead of down is a sure sign that something is wrong.

Time for more games. I think I’m going to tackle Haunting Ground again, since the Fiance has no desire to watch an extremely hot blonde teenager being chased by big ugly men…