This is very slightly in the direction of unasked-for advice, so please disregard if it’s totally unhelpful! I teach a class at my local writing center that’s aimed at helping people get writing done on long projects (where “long” really just means “longer than they’ve been able to work on so far”, so for some of them that’s daily poems or a single essay and for some it’s novels), and there are maybe two or three things from that class that your post made me think of?
1. I think that for me, setting time to think and work on the project every day (or, you know, every writing day, whatever that means to you) helps even/especially when I hit that horrible “is this broken or am I just having writer emotions” part. Like, some days it’s then half an hour of staring at a Canada goose, and some days it’s half an hour of scribbling sad thoughts about how you’re the worst writer ever born (I do think scribbling the thoughts is better than just thinking them, especially if your handwriting is kind of illegible so that it’s hard to torment yourself by rereading them…), and some days it’s 25 minutes of sad thoughts and five minutes of insight into whether it’s actually broken.
2. Everyone does have their own process, and I think our knowledge of what that process is can often be very subconscious, but…I wonder, I guess, if you know what types of activities help you (or have helped you in the past, at least) to figure out whether it’s just sad writer feelings vs actually busted book? For me it’s all the scribbling up above, plus like, long walks pondering grimly and also, weirdly, aggressively doing the dishes, but this is very idiosyncratic and specific.
And the other thought of course is that sometimes someone else can tell you if it’s actually broken, or even just having a friend read it and become enthusiastic about it sometimes suffices to be like, oh actually I too am enthusiastic now…
Anyway, very sorry for the unsolicited advice…and also hello! I think I followed you originally because I like your fiction a lot (especially the Gawain novella, which I often think about as an ideal version of a certain kind of dashing bad idea character), but ultimately subscribed because of the book reviews, which continue to be excellent. I hope any of this is at all useful, or at least not too irritating!
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1. I think that for me, setting time to think and work on the project every day (or, you know, every writing day, whatever that means to you) helps even/especially when I hit that horrible “is this broken or am I just having writer emotions” part. Like, some days it’s then half an hour of staring at a Canada goose, and some days it’s half an hour of scribbling sad thoughts about how you’re the worst writer ever born (I do think scribbling the thoughts is better than just thinking them, especially if your handwriting is kind of illegible so that it’s hard to torment yourself by rereading them…), and some days it’s 25 minutes of sad thoughts and five minutes of insight into whether it’s actually broken.
2. Everyone does have their own process, and I think our knowledge of what that process is can often be very subconscious, but…I wonder, I guess, if you know what types of activities help you (or have helped you in the past, at least) to figure out whether it’s just sad writer feelings vs actually busted book? For me it’s all the scribbling up above, plus like, long walks pondering grimly and also, weirdly, aggressively doing the dishes, but this is very idiosyncratic and specific.
And the other thought of course is that sometimes someone else can tell you if it’s actually broken, or even just having a friend read it and become enthusiastic about it sometimes suffices to be like, oh actually I too am enthusiastic now…
Anyway, very sorry for the unsolicited advice…and also hello! I think I followed you originally because I like your fiction a lot (especially the Gawain novella, which I often think about as an ideal version of a certain kind of dashing bad idea character), but ultimately subscribed because of the book reviews, which continue to be excellent. I hope any of this is at all useful, or at least not too irritating!