Writing (drafting) & revising are two totally different things.

Yeah, you'd think I'd have known that before now, since I spent most of last year slashing and hacking at ACCURSED, rewriting scenes, upping character motivations, going through sentence by sentence to try and make every word exactly what I wanted (BTW-- that task? Not really possible & I'm sure I failed it a number of times. But 'letting go' is a post for another time).

So when I finally got back to working on DARLINGTON I thought I'd learned SO much. I thought I was going to just pick it up, run to The End and then BAM! I'd be back in revisions.

Heh. *twitch* Right. Not so much.

See, while revising I can indulge my totally insane detail-oriented self, but when drafting-- even when drafting a story where I know exactly where I want it to go-- I can't do that. Agonizing over each sentence just leaves me with three sentences & a sense of dread at the end of the day.

Yesterday someone linked to this piece on Twitter and this line in particular really resonated with me:

If you edit your thoughts before you get them down on paper - or onto your computer - you'll squeeze the life out of your message. You may even choke it off completely.

I've finally come to admit that I will never be someone who can edit as they go. Now, I don't think the above sentence applies to everyone, since everyone writes differently and I know a lot of great writers who do think before they type.

But I'm not one of them.

My problem getting this draft of DARLINGTON down wasn't that I didn't know where the story was going (mostly, I have for months). My problem wasn't that there wasn't enough action, that I don't know the character motivations well enough, anything else I went to & tried to "figure out." My problem was that I wasn't just letting myself make mistakes. I didn't want to write yet another manuscript that took me nearly a year to revise into submission-shape. But I'd forgotten that before that whole "revising" step came the "get the hell to the end" step.

And to get there, I have to allow myself to make mistakes.

Now, I could get into the myriad of reasons as to why I was holding too tightly to the reins of the story, but that's a long (& kind-of personal) post for another day. Let's just say for now, I've let them go. This means the writing is actually happening. It also means I've forgotten half of what I said & now need to re-read the last six chapters or so to figure out the next step.

Frustrating? Yes. But better than staring at the screen, dragging out one word a minute and feeling totally worthless.