Derailment

Hmmm… I realized something about my writing process today.




My muse is a rather fickle thing, so when I write, it sometimes happens that my writing just dries up.

And that generally doesn’t bother me. But now, I picked up an old half-finished WiP (Don’t Look Back) and finished it in less than 2000 words.

Except I’m not sure that it feels right. Well, the contents of the end feels okay. But the thing is that it feels like my flow has been interrupted.

So much time has passed (months to be exact) that even though I adore the story, it feels as if someone else wrote it. And it’s an incredible pain in the ass to finish something “someone else” wrote.

That’s probably why I chopped the story off at approximately 25000 words, regardless of loose ends and story issues. It’s better for me to rewrite it and fix everything then than spend months trying to pick up a derailed train of thought.

Sad thing is, I never had this problem with Doorways. But I guess that has a reason too. It’s on my mind all the time. It’s my priority. Even when I write something else, part of me is thinking about it. When I work on Doorways, it consumes everything else in my mind.

Which has me wondering.

Isn’t it better to keep pushing myself to write even when I don’t want to? Or does it even matter? Because after all, I will definitely be rewriting regardless of whether the book is perfect. Should I maybe just get the whole Doorways series out of my system before I try something else?

And most of all, I wonder if I should start rewriting Don’t Look Back today…

Do you have a story that consumes or threatens to consume most of your creativity? What do you do when you get another (very) good idea?