Cracking Open the Door

Wow, this blog is working really well, huh?

But actually I do want to post an update even though Stephen King says in On Writing that you should write with the door shut and rewrite with the door open, and he is pretty much a genius so probably knows what he is talking about. He did not say anything about blogging specifically though so I figure I’m good.

So I have been doing a lot of reading and writing and changing my mind, feeling alternately optimistic and discouraged. Basically I was originally trying to do this like humor memoir/essay/whatever but that wasn’t really working so I started a novel instead, and I’ve been working on that more or less regularly for a couple of months. I knew that it had some issues but I felt like if I just finished it everything would be fixable in like a second draft so I kept at it pretty diligently.

Then last night I had an epiphany and suddenly out of nowhere thought of a whole different setup that makes way more sense than the original premise, which is partially good because it will make my book like 1000x better, but partially sucks because now I have to completely start over just when I thought I finally had something going.

Anyway I am trying not to get too discouraged by that; I read a really great post on Wil Wheaton’s web site about learning from failure, and he says basically the same thing about how he started out writing one thing and it turned into something completely different. Also Michael Chabon has this massive unfinished novel that he started writing right after The Mysteries of Pittsburgh that he could never quite get to work out, and then he started something different that turned out to be Wonder Boys.

My biggest concern is that I’ll never actually finish anything, and that starting over is just another way to procrastinate instead of an actual step forward. But both the false starts I had did guide me toward what I hope is the story I really want to tell, and I feel like I have been learning a ton about how to write more effectively so I  think I might actually be onto something.

So I’ll keep you posted, maybe, or else you’ll just hear from me in another three months when I’m starting all over again.

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