Hey all.

I’ve been writing a novel recently - I’m only 2200 words in. It feels like so little and so much at the same time.

Until I graduated college, I loved writing. Reading, too. Then, it feels like my ADHD got much worse and I lost all the passion I had for both. I had about a year of really intense depression while trying to find my first job during COVID. I had basically written nothing for almost three years up until recently. I started, and did not finish, a short story, and am working now on this “novel”. The problem is that I love writing in the abstract, I love putting words together in interesting ways and telling a story. But I can’t stop looking at the word count and feeling hopeless. I can’t stop feeling like there’s no point to any of it because my writing is shit. I feel like all of my passion has just left and I don’t know how to get it back, but I desperately want it back.

This isn’t a question, really, despite the title. I guess I needed to vent and know if I’m not alone in having experienced this.

  • Laxaria@beehaw.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    If some of the challenge here is getting words on the page, a lot of the strategies many people employ for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – a self-imposed challenge to write a 50k+ word novel in November) usually works out somewhat well:

    1. It is ok to take a break, or have an unproductive day. For NaNoWriMo, the idea is to average about 1667~ words a day, but you don’t actually have to do that much everyday. Sometimes you have productive days, sometimes you have less. That’s ok.
    2. You are always “writing” even if you’re not actually putting words on the page. The creative process that comes with thinking about characters, planning, imagining settings, world building, plot considerations, conflict resolutions, and so on are all “writing” even if at the end of the day you wrote one sentence into your actual novel then took it out 5 hours later because you weren’t happy with it. If you do a lot of planning and note-taking, you might be surprised at how many words are actually in that big bulk of stuff.
    3. Less “should” mentality. It’s not a bad idea to frame away from thinking of it as “I should be writing”, or “my writing should be good/better”.
    4. Less use of the backspace button. Dump words on page, fix later (this 100% takes getting used to).
    5. Oftentimes, a novel can be broken down into scenes, stitched together with entry and exit transitions, chained together to flow from one scene to the next. A “scene” isn’t strictly a chapter per se (but a chapter can be a whole scene in and of itself), but rather a set of interactions between characters, setting, plot, and conflict (among other things). In the immediate term, you could consider changing your perspective from “writing a novel” to “writing a scene in the novel”, and as you build up scenes over time you start getting something that feels like a longer piece of work even if all you’ve done is write a few 500-1500 “in the moment” short stories chained together.

    Additionally, the traditional novel isn’t really the only kind of writing you can do. Novellas, short stories, poems, vignettes, scripts, even the Japanese Light Novel structure are all ways to write without necessarily feeling like one is forced into putting together this massive (or semi-massive) epic.