Looking for emotion
Oct. 16th, 2025 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkRecently, I've had the itch to write a new story for the first time in a while. At the same time, though, I feel like I'm lacking some kind of motivation/passion to throw myself into a new writing project. I even (despite my last entry) feel like I've lost motivation to edit Novel #4.
"If you can't feel the emotion, then how do you put it into words?" That's a quote from You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego, about writer's block, and I'm feeling that really keenly right now. I admire the writers who pump out multiple books a year, but that can't be me (at least, not at this point in my nonexistent career); when I write, I always need to be driven by some strong emotion and/or urge to explore a specific emotional state. If I don't have that, then it doesn't matter how much interesting worldbuilding I come up with; I can't write the story.
Maybe the ennui is, in part, from the fact that I've written five complete novels over the past ten years (yikes...), and I'm not an author who likes to consciously retread familiar territory. I couldn't be a career romance writer, because once I've done an enemies-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers or what have you, I don't have a desire to write the same trope again. At the same time, it's hard to come up with new tropes to explore all the time. Tropes are tropes for a reason.
*
In other news, and on the topic of editing Novel #4—I've been reflecting lately on how there is definitely a danger with over-editing one's work without the guidance of an editor.
I edited Novel #3 many times due to a vague revise & resubmit I received from an agent, and by the end of that process, I was also sick of the book. It's like trying to improve at a sport or musical instrument without having a coach—you're not sure what to look for, and when you try to pick apart your own work, you just start to think the whole thing sucks and you have no idea how to fix it.
It's especially rough because I'm under pressure to try to do as much editing as I can for this book because it was on submission before. With previous books, I've gotten to the point of "it's not perfect, but I know I'll have to do more edits with an agent/editor so I'm not going to obsess over making it flawless." But now, with Novel #4? I find myself falling into the perfection trap. And it sucks. Because I already edited this book quite a lot when I first drafted it—it's likely the book I've rewritten the most on a scene level (due to my inexperience with genre mystery at the time—I'm never drafting a novel in such a chaotic way again). And now I just feel like I'm in endless editing limbo and I'm tired of it.
(So tired, in fact, that while I originally conceived of this book as the start of a series, I would no longer be willing to write a series unless I'm earning royalties off this book. Not even if a publisher was willing to pay me an advance; I'd need an audience of fans who want a sequel first.)
"If you can't feel the emotion, then how do you put it into words?" That's a quote from You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego, about writer's block, and I'm feeling that really keenly right now. I admire the writers who pump out multiple books a year, but that can't be me (at least, not at this point in my nonexistent career); when I write, I always need to be driven by some strong emotion and/or urge to explore a specific emotional state. If I don't have that, then it doesn't matter how much interesting worldbuilding I come up with; I can't write the story.
Maybe the ennui is, in part, from the fact that I've written five complete novels over the past ten years (yikes...), and I'm not an author who likes to consciously retread familiar territory. I couldn't be a career romance writer, because once I've done an enemies-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers or what have you, I don't have a desire to write the same trope again. At the same time, it's hard to come up with new tropes to explore all the time. Tropes are tropes for a reason.
*
In other news, and on the topic of editing Novel #4—I've been reflecting lately on how there is definitely a danger with over-editing one's work without the guidance of an editor.
I edited Novel #3 many times due to a vague revise & resubmit I received from an agent, and by the end of that process, I was also sick of the book. It's like trying to improve at a sport or musical instrument without having a coach—you're not sure what to look for, and when you try to pick apart your own work, you just start to think the whole thing sucks and you have no idea how to fix it.
It's especially rough because I'm under pressure to try to do as much editing as I can for this book because it was on submission before. With previous books, I've gotten to the point of "it's not perfect, but I know I'll have to do more edits with an agent/editor so I'm not going to obsess over making it flawless." But now, with Novel #4? I find myself falling into the perfection trap. And it sucks. Because I already edited this book quite a lot when I first drafted it—it's likely the book I've rewritten the most on a scene level (due to my inexperience with genre mystery at the time—I'm never drafting a novel in such a chaotic way again). And now I just feel like I'm in endless editing limbo and I'm tired of it.
(So tired, in fact, that while I originally conceived of this book as the start of a series, I would no longer be willing to write a series unless I'm earning royalties off this book. Not even if a publisher was willing to pay me an advance; I'd need an audience of fans who want a sequel first.)
