The Desire to Hurry

I thought by now I’d be done with the thriller I started writing a year ago last June. In part it isn’t all my fault. I had a problem with shoulder surgery this summer that set back my writing. But that’s only part of the problem—if there even is a problem.

I’m impatient. That’s a given. I know I’m not the only one who wants to hurry along the process of creating a book, but I may be one of the worst. But at some point I’ve had to realize that being impatient does not serve me well as a writer.

Here’s how impatience shows up. I have a germ of an idea for a plot, and characters begin to step up. I write a few chapters and they go along nicely.

Then, after a while, I feel really satisfied because I have 50,000 words that seem to have sprung from nowhere. I’m pretty sure things are going to roar along. That’s when I make my mistake. I decide to read what I’ve got—after all, I’m way over halfway done. I settle in for a good read…and it’s awful. The plot I thought was pretty good turns out to have ghastly holes that I’m not sure I’ll be able to fix. Every single character sounds like ones I’ve read before. I know at that point that I was kidding myself—that this was a terrible idea for a book, that I’ll never finish it—in fact, maybe it’s time to stop writing and become a….well, anything but a writer.

What to do?? Do I plow forward, hoping by some miracle that it will all come together and make sense? Do I go back to the beginning and start reworking what you’ve got, shoring up the plot, fluffing up the characters? Do I have someone I trust read it, hoping it isn’t as bad as I think? Or do I abandon the whole thing?

I’ve tried each of these solutions, and the only one that works for me is to slog forward, setting a daily word count for myself. I remind myself that a beginning draft is an exploration, not an opportunity to write down finished thoughts. And somewhere along the line, the characters rescue me. They wake up, yawn, introduce themselves to me and tell me how the plot should actually unfold.

The trouble is, this takes time. I can rush it to a certain extent, but the process is the process.

When I finish, then it’s time to start all over with that notorious process called editing. I try to remember what I had in mind from the beginning. I begin to understand what the plot holes are and how they have to be plugged. More often than not, it’s because I haven’t actually fleshed out the characters and without characters the plot points don’t come to life. With that in mind, I let the characters evolve into their potential, honing the plot, filling in the setting so that it reflects the characters and plots…

Finally I am finished…again. And this time I have what is a real first draft. It needs more work. And I want more than anything for the damn book to be done. I want to hurry it along because I want to see the whole thing be what I envisioned when you started out. I want to present it to my agent. I want people to read it. Not only that, but I have another book tugging at the back of I mind.

But it won’t do to hurry, no matter how much I want to move along. If I am going to be true to the original vision, I have to keep going over it—sharpening, filling in, exploring side issues, doing final bits of research. Without all this work, what I have is just a shadow of the book I thought I was going to write.

It would be nice to have a magic wand that I could wave and have it all turn out the way I wanted, but that’s not the way it works. At least not yet. If anyone is holding that magic wand, pass it over!