Mar 11 2010
The damage vacation did to my Work in Progress
…with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass begins to revise [his novel]. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones.
-Edward Gorey
Over in my e-commerce blog, I’ve been talking about the damage going on vacation had on my customer relations and my feedback with my eBay business. But that wasn’t the only damage done by checking out of my life for a week and a half.
See, before we left for vacation, I was on Mistress Novel overload. I read many, many books on editing and fixing your writing. I read through the entire draft, making notes to myself on what to change. I did the editing of all editing on the first few chapters.
Even when I wasn’t actually working on the book (which was often in the rush to get all my work done before I left for vacation) I was thinking about the book constantly. This made edits and new scenes much easier because I had them all written out in my head before I ever actually got the chance to sit down and write them. Without an interruption, I would have finished my edits pretty quickly. I was living that novel every second.
Sadly, there was a good deal of interruption. The week before vacation was madness, trying to catch up with everything so we could leave and so I barely got to touch the book. I don’t want to make it sound like vacation is a bad thing. I had a wonderful time and I really needed some time off. But time-off meant time off from all of my work and that included my writing. I brought my novel along but I didn’t work on it much, mostly because I was afraid of losing or damaging my notes and draft by the pool which would have been a bad thing.
So after limited novel work the week before vacation, the last time I was able to seriously work on the book was close to 4 weeks ago. This is a huge problem. I went from living every second thinking about the novel non-stop to not having touched it. It feels like something a stranger wrote and I am in the “this is all crap, what idiot wrote this” stage of revision when I was feeling very good about the draft before vacation. I went to edit the novel yesterday and again today and it took me a full hour to edit a page each time. It’s like reading someone else’s work and it feels unfamiliar and awkward working on it. It also doesn’t help that I am still frantically trying to catch up and deal with the damage to the business that vacation caused.
Now, I know the fix for this is the just keep forcing myself to work on it until I pick up the thread again so that is what I have been doing, however slow the going is. But I when I think of that amazing mindset I was in about the book before vacation, I cannot help but think that the book would have been better off if I hadn’t gone on vacation and had finished it right then and there.
The lesson I am supposed to take away from this, I suspect, is that I should have still worked on vacation. But, damn it, I already had to check emails and do other work over vacation, what kind of break is it if I have to do all my work?
Frustrated at the moment. But got to keep slogging on as they say.
Hillary is an award winning playwright, fiction and non-fiction author best known for her play, The Love of Three Oranges which has been performed around the world. A Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo ML, she loves connecting with other writers no matter what their experience levels. For the business side of blogging, publishing and selling, visit Hillary at The Whine Seller. See a complete list of Hillary’s blogs and books here.
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