This month I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge, blogging every day of the month of April, except Sundays, on a topic from A to Z. I’m posting short-form topics meant to get you talking and sharing! Join the discussion in the comments.
Have you ever tried to rewrite a book you wrote a long time ago? Or start over on it? Or work again on some other artwork that you left behind?
If you have, you likely know that it’s not so easy. That in some ways it’s even harder than starting fresh. Especially if you already started rewriting and stopped in the middle.
That’s what I’m doing at the moment, and I’m noticing the contrast between that and how it felt when I kept my momentum going and worked every day on The Flight of the White Crow.
When you don’t stop, you don’t have time to change your mind. You live with the work the way it is in the moment and you move on it, instead of second-guessing yourself.
When you take a long time to work on something, going away and coming back a lot, it’s easy to change your mind over and over.
It’s also easy to forget where you were. You have to spend hours just reacquainting yourself with the decisions you made before, only to change your mind and redo them now.
When you don’t stop, you create a voice for the work, and it is easier to live in that voice. If you go away and come back, you lose touch with it. It’s a struggle to find your way back into that voice.
This is the power of momentum.
Have you tried working both ways, quickly and consistently as well as slowly over a long period of time? What advantages did you find in one over the other? Which way do you prefer? How do you find ways to keep your momentum?
I do find working daily on a project keeps a flow, but sometimes stepping away from a book can be good, too. I couldn’t get one particular novel to come together, so I wrote something else that became my debut. When I (eventually) came back to the problematic story, I was able to fix it. (It comes out in October.) So putting it aside gave me some much-needed perspective.
Great cover for your book! I’m still trying to get my designer to really get the whole contrast aspect. That dog was too perfect to pass up. 😀 I hear you about stepping away; I did that a lot in the years when I was just writing without knowing how to plan. These days I plan everything out first in a lot of detail, so when I write it’s better for me to just keep going and doing it every day. I find that if I stop it means not coming back to it for months or years. It’s too easy for me to get trapped in NOT doing it.
PS — Love the dog pic.