Into the compost heap of literature.
I’ve been working on White Space IV, which I had to toss out completely and go back and start drafting from scratch, because the damned thing just didn’t have an engine in it. Now I think it does, because after poking at it and not being able to make it go for a month, I managed to get back up to about 7500 words in just a few days.
Now I’m stalled again because I have to figure out this next scene, which is pivotal to the whole book, and I’m not quite sure how it works out. So it’s time to let it simmer for a little.
In the meantime, I just took a break for a couple of days to write a short story that I was asked to contribute to an anthology on short notice. Normally I might not be able to do this, but I happened to have an idea and a couple of paragraphs kicking around that I had been trying to figure out for (checks watch) nearly twenty years, my goodness. And apparently the time was right, because I managed to get a draft done in a couple of days of work. Which included throwing out everything I already had written except the last line, because I decided that the reason I was stuck was that I was starting the story in entirely the wrong way.
There’s probably a lesson here that’s worth considering. It might be “Nothing is wasted,” and it might be “Don’t be afraid to throw stuff away,” and it might be something else entirely. I said on bluesky that one of the primary differences between amateur writers and professional writers is that professional writers throw out a lot more words than amateur writers do, and I guess I’m proving my professionalism or something.
The funny thing is that it only hurts until you grit your teeth and do it. Then there’s a sense of freedom that didn’t exist before, and a chance to do better than last time. Of course, one needs to limit the number of times one starts over from scratch because otherwise one will never hit that deadline, but still. And the false starts may turn out to be necessary too.
Sometimes we’re not writing that stuff for anybody else. We’re writing it for ourselves.
See some of you at Readercon!
Best,
Bear