Avi

word craft

blog

When you sense something is wrong

worried manYou are work­ing on a project and you have a nag­ging sense that the book is not going well. You work on your text, and you change, this, that, and the oth­er thing. Small stuff, real­ly. Been there. Done that. The neg­a­tive nag­ging per­sists. If you are a reader—and I do not know how you can be writer with­out being a reader—your intu­ition tells you that some­thing is still wrong.

I vote for trust­ing your intu­ition. If you sense some­thing is wrong, I am bet­ting some­thing is wrong, miss­ing, not writ­ten. Still, you do not know what to do. This is why soci­ety has priests, psy­chol­o­gists, part­ners, spous­es, best friends, book-writ­ing groups, and edi­tors. You can deter­mine your own order of importance—for insight into your work.

Because here comes the hard part. Some­times you need to make a BIG change. As in life, so it is in writ­ing: big changes are hard to make. What kind of changes? A fun­da­men­tal shift in plot, char­ac­ter, end­ing, begin­ning, mid­dle …. Some­thing BIG is need­ed. Believe me, such changes—as in life—are very hard to do. Been there. Tried to do it.

Years ago, I was teach­ing a writ­ing class and a stu­dent wrote some­thing tru­ly banal. I said to this writer, “Is this any­thing like life? Any­thing like your life?”

“No,” the writer whispered.

I said, “Why not make it like life as you have tru­ly expe­ri­enced it?”

There were tears in this writer’s eyes. “Because no one ever gave me permission.”

Per­mis­sion granted.

The next thing this writer offered me was terrific.

3 thoughts on “When you sense something is wrong”

  1. Wow! What a great post! I think you hit my prob­lem right on the head. I sup­pose my job now is to hire a priest or a psy­chol­o­gist! Yet you have done so many books you must have a trick to unstick? I think we all have to look where we feel ashamed to find the answers? We are not risk­ing enough. Just a the­o­ry. ‑Eri­ka

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts