Notebook Work

I made an off-handed comment in a recent post that writing is hard for me, despite the fact that I enjoy it. I’ve been thinking about it the last couple of weeks and it’s something that I want to try to understand as it seems contradictory to me.

I think my biggest obstacle is my inner critic. Take, for example, this flippant comment I made on a fellow writer’s post about writer’s block, blaming it on my inner critic:

Me, writing: “The-“

Inner critic: “That’s fucking terrible.”

Flippant though it may be, and extreme, this is nonetheless a pretty accurate depiction of how the inner critic can interfere with the writing process. It can be hard for me to silence my inner critic, especially in the absence of external validation and encouragement. My inner critic draws its power from my perfectionism. It’s not enough for me to want to write a story; I want to write a great story. And while that is a perfectly acceptable goal, the problem lies in a misconception I’ve built about my process.

This misconception came from recency bias in my memory for what it was like to write Clean Freak. I front-loaded a lot of notebook work before creating the first Word Document, and whenever I got stuck, it was in the notebook that I worked it out. For example, I was stuck on writing from Lucy’s perspective for Chapter 3 until I did the notebook work for it in purple crayon.

But after a certain point in the story, I needed to do less and less notebook work because the story was just there. Because it was in the pages of the story. I didn’t need to establish backstories or explain relationships or specify timelines to keep everything straight in my head because it was part of the story that was written.

So the misconception that I came away from that part of the process with was that I was… I don’t know, “leveling up” and had grown into a writer that didn’t need to do notebook work for my stories.

So, after Clean Freak was published and I tried to jump into the next story, I tried to do so without doing the kind of notebook work that had made the process of writing previous stories successful and enjoyable.

I wrote recently about my realization that I am a plotter rather than a pantser. This realization came while working on my current WIP, for which I wrote a bunch of notes at the beginning of the process, when I first conceived the story, but for which I’ve done very little notebook work since then. As I’ve been working on it, I’ve realized that I am going to need to go back, develop the story from the first draft, and rewrite it almost in its entirety. While I’m looking forward to this process, because it’s a new way to work for me, I’m also somewhat frustrated by it.

I’m pushing through to finish Codename: Memories, trying to focus on this story, but of course I have other ideas. And I will be purchasing notebooks for those ideas.