Day fourteen of the writing streak
I thought a lot about my struggles of the past few days, and how I wanted to handle them. In the end I decided not to delete nor rewrite anything. But neither do I want to continue in the direction that things have been going. That’s why in the end I decided to simply add a paragraph of notes in my document, in which I briefly typed up the things that I would like to change, and then I continued on writing my story as if these changes had already been made. I’ve heard of other writers doing this in their discovery drafts, and even though that sounds absolutely messy for when the time of the next draft comes around, I think that for today it was the right choice. With this way of doing things, I didn’t force myself to continue with a path that I didn’t like, nor did I fall into the temptation of editing and/or rewriting what I already had, which is good because I had this strong feeling that if I allowed myself to delete and rewrite the part that didn’t resonate with me, my brain would make itself believe that I would then have to make sure that whatever I rewrote was perfect, which would most probably have made me fall back into the cycle of writing-erasing-rewriting. And that is not what I need to do right now. I have to remind myself that this draft is all about me discovering the story, and that it doesn’t matter if it sounds any good right now. Once I know how everything goes, that’s when it’ll be time to think about making it all coherent and sound good. But I’ve still got a long way to go before reaching that point. And yeah, whenever I do reach that point, I’ll probably feel overwhelmed, and maybe a little upset at my past self, for having made such weird changes and having added random notes here and there of things for me to figure out later. But if this is what I need to do right now to move the story along, then I know that future me will forgive past me, and even be grateful for all the mess I’ll have made, if that mess helps me, as much as it did today, to create the story.
I don’t know if, from the point of view of my MC, I advanced all that much in the story today, but the progress I did make feels huge to me right now, and I am much happier with where the story is currently heading than I’ve been for the past few days.