One response to this paralysis, though, is to focus so much on tinkering and polishing while focusing on story minutiae that very little forward motion is actually achieved. Because if what you put down isn't perfect, then it's not time to move on to the next section yet.
That is often a trap, though.
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| There's stages to this... which is unavoidable. |
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You Can Be Perfect, But You'll Never Finish
This is something I've struggled with, myself, and it really came home to me with a recent piece I was working on.
As regular readers know, I've done a lot of work with the YouTube channel A Vox in The Void over the past few years. So when the channel reached out to me, and asked if I wanted to work on a Weird War 2 story set in the Pacific theater, I was more than happy to get to work on that project. Over the past month, this led to me penning the story Where The Red Flowers Bloom, a tale about a Japanese outpost beset by something that they've awakened on a tiny island in the Philippines where they weren't supposed to see any kind of action.
And while I'm proud of this story, I can't lie... it was an absolute mess to get through!
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| Fortunately, this is something I'm used to by now. |
Part of the challenge of this story was that I didn't know as much about the Pacific theater of the second World War as I would like. So there was a lot of stopping and starting as I checked common surnames around the time period, ranks in the army, the types of equipment troops were assigned, and so on, and so forth. In addition to that, though, the story is purposefully written without dialogue to facilitate turning it into an audio drama. Lastly, I was trying to keep the story within a relatively tight 4,000 words or so.
And I will be the first to admit, that first draft came out hard, slow, and it needed more than a little bit of polishing once I had it done.
However, something that I want to remind folks of is that forward momentum counts for a lot when it comes to making your story into a reality. Not only that, but if you spend all of your time sweating the details when you're in the thick of the writing, that's when you will often squander your energy by doing a hundred little things instead of putting words on the page. Everything I mentioned, from checking the type of sidearm given to Japanese soldiers during the war, to what a common surname would have been, to reading about the mystery cults of war gods found in some isolated cultures in the region, all of those details were very important to the overall story... but none of those details needed to be present in the moment while I was writing that first draft.
For example, our protagonist's name is Tanaka. I could have just had him listed as 'Steve' and then changed it in post until I finished the first draft and settled on the perfect name. The vehicle used in the early part of the story is a Kurogane Type-95 scout vehicle, but I could have just called it a Jeep for the first draft, and changed it afterward. All of these details are important to the accuracy of the story, and getting the period and feeling right... but sometimes attempting to do research while you're writing leads to death-by-a-thousand-cuts... particularly if you're the sort of writer who (like most of us) will vanish down a research rabbit hole at the first opportunity. Because by the time you clamber out of that hole, all your energy is gone, and you've forgotten where you were in the narrative.
While we should always check and double-check our facts, read over our work, and take all the steps to produce the best project we can, it's important to keep what I said in As a Creator, Learn to Trust The Process in the forefront of your mind. Namely that this is a process, and there's more than one step to it. Get used to allowing yourself not to be perfect during that first draft, because you can always take a bad first draft and improve it. What you can't do, though, is take a non-existent draft, and claim it will be perfect.
It takes practice to do this, but it's a skill worth mastering. Because the first draft is just for getting the story down on paper, where you can mold and shape it. Remember that, and act accordingly.
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When I was studying architecture in college, I was faced with tight deadlines and had to give up my perfectionist attitude. Perfect, on the 15th revision wouldn't work since the project would be due before then. So good enough on the 5th-7th revision had to do. That was a hard lesson to learn.
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