It’s often said among writer-types that the prospect of staring at a blank page during the first stages of writing is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. The pressure of how to start a story, or about what story to even tell, can seem to cripple the expedition before it has had a chance to start, resulting in hours lost simply pondering that featureless sheet of paper or computer screen. And while the anxiety of trying to find the perfect words to fill that page on the first draft is one that is all to familiar to me as well, I also find a certain degree of freedom to be found in initial starting point, a sense of wonder that this story could go anywhere and that it might reveal itself in an entirely different form than you once expected.
What is sometimes more terrifying to me, on the other hand, is when I have finished that first draft, and have multiple sheets of paper filled with scrawled or rambling text that I then have to sift through in order to find the through-line of the story being told.
I recently finished what I would probably consider the third draft of a story I’m hoping to submit in the next month or so. It still has some potential issues and fixes I’ll be trying to iron out in the mean time, but otherwise I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out. The thing that makes me dread sitting down for those last few rounds of edits is the fact that the story is about thirty or so words shy of reaching a 10,000 word count. I know that compared to novels of any size, but especially the 400+ page tomes that are popular these days, that number is paltry in comparison (for example the lowest word count for something to be considered a novel is around 50,000 words), but for me, that number I have reached with this story is daunting. When I look at my computer screen and scroll through falling walls of text that start to blur into a indistinct blob, I can get overwhelmed by the prospect of having to comb through all of that information with each subsequent draft.
I think part of this anxiety comes from the fact that a longer a piece of writing becomes, the more likely it will be that a narrative inconsistency or some similar sort of problem will pop up. The bigger a story gets, the more details are thereby added and contained within that piece, and each of those details have to either be followed through by the end or make sense from start to finish. I find myself petrified while writing even shorter works that I’ll make a mistake like this, and that I won’t be able to catch it because of how many lines and pages of text I’d need to sift through in order to pick it out. To make that jump to a novel-length project, and have even MORE instances for the possibility of accident is something I just haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet.
A big part of this, I believe, is my tendency to, for the most part, wing a lot of the narrative beats contained within my stories. I definitely have an idea developed in my head, with different scenes I want to happen or themes I’d like to explore, but the minutiae of specific details a lot of times come about during the writing process. Because of this, concepts or ideas that start off slightly vague at the beginning of a draft can sometimes be further developed later on in the narrative, so that then I’ll have to go back and try to explore or elucidate those facts within those earlier moments. I’m not sure if that’s what novel, or even series authors do, but in my own experience it’s a difficult process even within the short story format, so I can’t even begin to comprehend its complexity in pieces substantially longer.
Fortunately, as it is with artistic endeavors of any kind, practice is the best solution to something like this, and I feel like I’ve made a lot of headway with this most recent project. I’m trying to write longer, more narratively-complex pieces in general this year, both as a means of improving my own writing craft, but also with the express intent of psyching myself up to one day write something that is novel-length or longer. It’ll probably be a long road till then, but I’m definitely conscious of the obstacles I’ll need to overcome along the way and am doing all that I can in order to improve.