This is weird.

Back when I was writing my first novel, Dark Heart, I got about a third of the way through and started to panic. I was finding it hard to write in the pseudo-Victorian style, and as I’d decided to make it first person from about six different points of view it seemed like I was deliberately making it as difficult as possible. I considered stopping, and switching to my superhero story (now called Seven Wonders), which I thought would be much easier as it’s a modern-day, third-person book. Standard fare, easy to write.

Fortunately I saw good sense and kept on with Dark Heart, and shortly after my angst I found the natural pace of it and the whole thing took off. I was done in a couple of months, with 120,000-ish words done. That book was put in the draw to be worried about later this year.

Seven Wonders has reached about 20,000 words, and is completely horrible to write. This is my first full-length third-person novel, and I’m finding the style very, very dull. Sure, I’ve read plenty of great third-person books, and most people prefer it to first (and nobody uses second, unless the book is deliberately strange). But it’s boring to write, and boring to read back. Maybe I’m destined to write steampunk and alternate Victorian histories. Maybe superheroes, as much as I love them, are not for me, at least in prose form.

So now it occurs to me I’ve hit exactly the same point as I did in Dark Heart, where I have convinced myself it’s all worthless and that I’m better off switching to something else.

It feels worse this time, but then I’m probably just saying that. I’m sure the Dark Heart roadblock was just as bad. And the thing is I need to get my writing habits down pat, which means finishing this 100,000 word novel so I can get on to the next one. If I allow myself to stop a book mid-flow once, I’ll let myself do it twice, three times, etc. By the year’s end I’ll have written half a million words and have four abandoned novels.

The problem, I suppose, is that I’m worrying about what I write. There are two things I need to remind myself of.

One, the first draft is going to be cack. This is the vomit draft, the type anything draft, the get the story down on paper so you don’t forget the plot draft. This is about typing 100,000 words, one after another, until I reach the end. Nobody will ever read this draft. Which brings me to:

Two, any and all problems in the first draft will be fixed in the rewrite. So I write a page of the worst prose ever produced by a human being. So what? When it comes to draft two, I’ll spot it a mile off and will rewrite it until it’s good. Easy.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. If I can fool my conscious mind into believing those two facts, perhaps my subconscious will do the work for me and will get the remaining 80,000 words down. And the quicker I get those words down, the quicker I can file this away as novel number 2, and get on with the third. Novel 1 was an achievement; novel 2 will show me that it wasn’t a fluke.

Ok, problem solved. Thanks for listening!