Characters must face irreversible decisions. These cause them stress, doubt, and anxiety. Or should. One of the best ways to engage readers is to get them worrying about the characters they love and/or identify with.
Writers, on the other hand, don’t usually face truly irreversible decisions until they turn in a final manuscript. Yes, there are submissions to editors, contest judges, producers, and agents. But there are always more of these people out there to give the story a chance.
And yet, writers (and other creative people) tend to imagine they have only one chance to select a protagonist or get the ending right. They have to choose a genre or a form and stick with it, o they’ll never have a career. Sometimes, they get hung up on individual words in a manuscript.
My experience says “irreversible” is an illusion. One story I’m most proud of went from having a middle-aged man as the protagonist to a young woman to a teenage boy. I wrote a hundred pages with the middle-aged man and more than that with the woman. (By the way, these helped me work out plot ideas. And the middle-aged man ended up being a secondary character in the final manuscript.)
On genre, I’ve written SF, romance, thriller, fantasy, comedy and straight drama. I have published short stories, six one-act plays, two produced Web series episodes, and two optioned scripts. I’ll produce my own fiction podcast later this year. This diversity of projects isn’t for everyone, but listen to your muse and don’t be afraid to experiment. You’ll learn more and have more fun.
Besides commitments on specific works, writers can have trouble committing to a Work in Progress. This leads to dithering, as valuable writing time is squandered deciding which project to work on each day. Or, even worse, it can lead to a kind of literary promiscuity that causes unfinished manuscripts to pile up.
What looks like indecisiveness may be an unrealistic vision of success. (I’ll have a novel published by the time I’m thirty.) Or concerns about losing ground. (I can’t waste time with multiple drafts or my opportunities will disappear.) Or comparisons. (By my age, Fitzgerald already had three successful novels.)
At heart, all of these pretend there is a path or a schedule. Unless you’re like a man I know who felt stalked by death (no man in his family had lived past 50), it’s time to recognize the limits of ambition. When it keeps you exploring and developing stories and developing your craft, ambition is your ally. When it becomes your judge and taskmaster or encourages to chase market trends, it is your enemy.
Doubt may also be behind making decisions. This is healthy if it’s a signal to explore how a scene might be written (say, by looking at the work of other authors) or flesh out a character or ask questions or do some research. If doubt keeps you active and contributes to moving a story forward, it isn’t really fear of commitment. It’s a deepening of commitment. When it freezes you or causes you to look for distractions, that’s a problem. Some unhealthy doubts may be:
• “I’m not good enough.” - Which is better seen as a chance to try and prove it. If you fail, you’ll learn something that makes you a better writer. If you succeed, mark it down as proof you’re a better writer than the editor in you head tells you you are.
• “I’ve gotten off track.” - Even if you have an outline, there is no track. Even if the genre has obligatory tropes (like meet cute in romances), there are no wrong turns. There are just pages that respond to muse or experiment with possibilities. There is a rule of thumb for reading a book. Read 100 pages minus your age. I think this works for fiction writing, too. Write 100 “off-track” pages minus your age before you jettison the effort.
• “This is a waste of time.” - This is an unrealistic view of writing. Real writers have false starts. They complete works that should never see the light of day. They end up revising over and over again. This is not you screwing up. It is you learning to be a better writer or moving from rough idea to polished story through the normal process.
This last leads directly into concerns about literary promiscuity. Now, sometimes, that’s doubt manifested in a bigger way. Or it may be fear of pain and exposure (which will be explored later in this series). But it probably is more along the lines of “This is a better use of my time.” With very few exceptions, this perspective is wrong. This is true even if you have a sure-fire idea that will be a big hit and make your career. Why? Because you never know what your story offers until you finish it.
And if you pile up a lot of unfinished works, you’ll miss important —essential — lessons you must learn to create that sure-fire hit. Go ahead and make notes on that glorious idea, but finish what you are working on. Don’t set it aside. Two approaches to being more persistent: 1) Make a list of reasons why the Work in Progress must be finished. 2) Write shorter works so you can complete them and move on to your current infatuation.
Fear of commitment is a theme in romances. It’s often associated with Dan Kiley’s Peter Pan Syndrome, which Wikipedia defines as “an inability to grow up or to engage in behavior usually associated with adulthood.“ What this implies to me is that writers facing a fear of commitment may still be maturing.
Suffering the disappointment and uncertainties created by indecision and literary promiscuity may be fine before becoming a professional or in the early years of a career. Growing up isn’t easy, and the process brings its own lessons. But, if you think it’s time to be a grown-up writer, a deeper look at your fears and trying persistence and literary fidelity and articulating reasons for finishing a work and acceptance of your own creative timetable may be worth considering.
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