kriadydragon | *Melts in Relief* (Reply)

It is done! After ten months of writing and struggling to write and almost giving up then not giving up and writing some more... It. Is. Done! The original fic is done!

Okay, not done done, but the obnoxious writing portion is done. Which means moving on to edits, which is what I've been looking forward to. I like the story and the direction it's heading but there's so much tweaking to be done and it was hard not to go back and get those tweaks started before the story was finished. Now that it is finished, I can focus on the tweaking :D.

Try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to breeze through this story riding on the thought "I can fix it later." I'm one of those writers who likes to get things right the first time. Not right as in perfect, but right as in getting down what I want to happen rather than write whatever and figure it out later. I tend to settle for less, especially when frustrated or stressed, so as long as I have what I was aiming for then I don't have to worry about settling for less - I can either settle for what I have or aim higher, but either way it's all good. If that made any sense :P.

And I think writing this story has taught me a lot. 1) don't work on multiple projects, especially if a due date is involved. 2) if my brain is dead set on not writing the story, and no matter how hard I try I either write nothing or only a paragraph, that means it's time to pause and put more thought into what I'm about to write, as there's something going on with that part that isn't working out. 3) Write in an environment that is conducive to writing. My room, apparently, was not conducive to writing. 4) it can be fixed, and it's okay to take your time - even if that time ends up being ten months. Finally, 5) plot and outline like crazy. One of the stumbling blocks of this ten month fic was that I jumped right into it without letting it sit for a year then working on a somewhat detailed outline. I had an outline, but it wasn't detailed, and this caused me to have to stop for days on end to figure out - in detail - what happens next. Though what I write doesn't really follow with what I have outlined, outlines at least provide a starting point from which to work my way forward. If the story goes in a different direction, that's fine, but at least I had it worked out enough so as not to have to take several days to ponder what happens next.

However, though I like the story, my biggest worry at the moment is that the frustration I had with it will kill the muses of this fic. It's a three book story (maybe four) and at the extreme moment I'm not looking forward to writing the next two books. My hope is that some heavy and involved editing, plus writing other things to cleanse the mental pallet, will help me forget the frustration and renew my motivation to continue this story. The story was a pain to write but, as I said, I like the direction it's going and continues to go. And though my motivation to write it is exhausted, I'm already figuring out what should happen in the next two books.

Finally, if I were to give someone one piece of writing advice, it would be this - find your own style. Don't try to emulate existing works. I find myself getting into that happen with this story - using what others have done as a template - but all it did was discourage me. Once I stopped doing that and focused on what the story needed rather than what I wanted it to be, it became a lot easier to sit down and write.

Now, to bed. I'm exhausted :P