Novel Writing Angst

[rsadelle]

I love writing fic. I love it even when I'm writing things I know no more than one or two people are ever going to read. There is something about taking characters and situations and playing around with them and asking questions about them that is deeply satisfying to me.

I do not love writing original fic. I get some measure of satisfaction out of having written one not great and one good novel, and I've learned some good things about writing from the experience (not least being just how much you can write with an average of only 200 words a day), but I don't love doing it. I'm 70,000 words into book three, and I've hit one of those patches where I just do not care enough to make myself work on it. To be clear: by "work on it," I mean write 200 words on weekdays and 300 words on weekends. Two to three hundred words is nothing. In the average I-feel-good sort of week, I will write at least one 700-1000 word plot bunny or snippet that is unconnected to anything else I'm writing. Word count is not the issue. The issue is that I don't care. You'd think I'd be more connected to characters I created myself, but I'm not. I'm not that interested in my plot. I find writing the story boring. When I finally got around to doing the consistency read-through of book two, I really enjoyed it as a story, but that's not how I felt about it when I was writing it, and while I'm trying to remind myself that I will probably like book three when I eventually reread it, that doesn't make me want to work on it now.

Part of my problem is that I don't have any incentive. The immediate incentive I'd been using was that once I did my novel writing for the day, then I could go do my fic writing (the writing I really love doing). But since I finished both my large, word counted fic projects and am on to editing them (let's not talk about how much I hate editing my own work), I don't have that incentive. (This also means I don't do any other writing either because I feel guilty about not having done my novel writing and therefore think I don't deserve to get to write other things.) The long-term incentive, of course, was the idea that I might be able to make money off of doing this. That requires me to, you know, try to make money off of it by trying to sell the damn book. This is something I don't know how to do. There's probably some fear of failure in not figuring out how and just doing it, but probably there's more fear of doing it wrong. (Uh, if you don't know this about me, I have a really, really hard time dealing with being wrong. It comes from being a smart kid who was always expected to know the right answer.) I had contact a while ago with a friend of a friend who works in erotica e-book publishing and told me to let her know when I finished it, but it was so long ago now that I feel weird about trying to draw on that connection. I also bookmarked a Tumblr post by a fangirl or fangirl-adjacent editor (possibly the same person, but I never looked into it enough to know) telling fan fic authors they can submit their original fic to her. So I guess there are resources and I could just get my shit together and email them. Then there's one of my other trepidations about this path: what I understand about the publishing world today is that if you want people to buy the book you wrote, you have to promote it, and I can't even begin to tell you how much I do not want to do that. I don't even do that with fan fic, which is the stuff I actually care about. If I could sell book two and actually make some money off of it, then I might see a purpose in working on book three, but I just haven't been able to make myself do that.

I'm not sure exactly what I want out of this post. I don't know if I want advice (and I definitely don't want "just do it" advice; that's not helpful and will only make me feel like a failure). Part of me wants permission to give up on writing original fic, but I don't think I've done a very good job with this post in conveying just how big the difference is between my enjoyment of writing fic and my dislike of writing original fic. (And I've told so many people I was writing a book, and I never know what to say to them when they ask me about it now, much less if I give up.) Mostly, I think, I want someone to pay attention and listen to me and acknowledge my feelings.

Comments

[unperfectwolf.livejournal.com]

I am acknowledging your feelings! We could do word wars, if that would help. Or, I don't know. I can bake cookies and mail them only if you reach your weekly word count.

HOW CAN I HELP?

Also, don't give up! It will feel awesome when it's done. Someday.

(Also, you know how much I want the Segs/Brownie fic, so of course my first thought was SHE COULD USE THAT FIC TO WRITE MORE)

[rsadelle]

Awww, ♥ Thanks for the support! I might start putting concrete book three word count goals in both sets of my weekly check-ins. Maybe that will help.

(Ha! Eventually, maybe. I have sternly told my brain that I cannot work on that until it comes up with a structure for it. Also, I have to finish editing Danny goes to college and Post-Switzerland Tyler Seguin before I can make anything else a primary, word counted project.)

[bestliars.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting, and I really appreciated hearing your thoughts about this. You're so right that there's a totally different reward in writing fic than their is in writing original stuff. I know I don't really understand why writing one makes me feel different than the other. I don't have anything helpful to say, but I hear you, and agree that is a complicated space.

[rsadelle]

♥ I appreciate you listening! It is so very different.

[norwich36.livejournal.com]

Reading this is making me realize I don't know when you stopped having a writers group. (I assume you've stopped since I haven't heard about it in ages and ages). I wonder if having a RL group of people to talk about this stuff would make you feel heard? Or would it just make you feel guilty?

What if you just gave yourself permission to abandon it for a set period of time (maybe 3 or 6 months)? You might feel differently about it if it weren't a millstone constantly hanging around your neck. Is that too advice-y?

[rsadelle]

I left that writing group in 2010, so yes, it's been a while.

[norwich36.livejournal.com]

I would feel worse about not remembering that, except that I think I just don't experience the passage of time in the same way anymore. I was cleaning my spare room today and kept coming up with documents from work, etc., thinking--oh, I should save that, it's pretty recent--and looking at the date and it was 2010 (or 2008, or in one case 2006). So my justification is that it seemed like just a couple months ago to me. :-) Early senility.

[rsadelle]

Ha! Time does seem to move so quickly.

[terl-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm going to say give it up, or at least take a break from it, if it's not making you happy or out-and-out annoying you. Your happiness is more important than making money and making money in writing is a crapshoot anyway. Maybe if you just work on the stuff you like for a while you'll get your inspiration back for your original stuff. Or maybe you won't and you'll just work at your day job and keep your writing just for fun. There's no wrong choice.

(Or maybe I'm just projecting b/c I feel the same way about my own original work a lot - it's like, well, I make decent money at my day job and I don't have 10,000 tumblr assholes waiting to call for my death if I say anything they don't like, so is there really a reason to try to become a Rich, Famous Author instead of just writing id porn for my own amusement? IDK, I still say do whatever you think is going to make you happiest in the long term.)

[rsadelle]

Part of why I think it would be good for me to try to sell book two is that then I would be able to actually know how much money original writing (it's all erotica, which probably isn't going to become mainstream famous) could make, which would be a deciding factor in whether or not it's worth it. (That is kind of how I've been thinking about it, although I'm pretty sure you make a lot more money in your day job than I do in mine, so the amount I could make off of writing that would make it worth it for me might be a lot less than the amount that would make it worth it for you.)