I'm in the middle of after-the-fact-outlining the rough draft of Sahmara's Sunset and I hate this novel. There, I said it. It's been awhile since I've immersed myself in bringing order to a rough draft and I was hoping this point in the process would overlook me this time. Alas, I am not so fortunate.
What the hell was the potency of the sparkly-my-words-are-made-awesomesauce endorphins that I was riding high on when writing this? Yes, there are good moments, but damn, the misnaming of stuff, horrible phrasing, extra words in the middle of sentences, summary telling, and where-the-frak-was-I-going-with-this moments are overwhelming.
I brought this upon myself, I know this, having written 50k of this years ago and the dropping back in to add another 21K as time allowed with multiple year gaps between efforts. The random was sure to happen. But damn.
The saddest thing is that I read through what did exist just last October and straightened things up at little. At least I thought I did. Clearly I was in the midst of some high stress times because I screwed things up far more than an form of straightening. Towns were misnamed from one chapter to the next. People had helms and daggers and then they didn't. Inline notes made defied logic. And the thing is, I remember thinking these things over, sure I was correcting mistakes.
And the lesson in all this? When under heavy stress, step away from the keyboard.
Okay, venting over. Back to slogging through the hate to find the bits of sparkle.
Ugh! Sounds like a nightmare, you have my sympathies. I don't have enough partial MSs on the shelf to have hit this problem but I had kinda the opposite. When I went back to an old MS, I loved what I'd written but could not get back into the writing groove. Kept getting bogged down after only adding a few k words. Took me several tries to find a way forward.
ReplyDeleteHave you tried going back to basics and asking yourself about the story premise and the characters? Do you still love them? If so, there's something you can use as a starting point for bringing the writing itself back under control.