by 
Hello again. I used to never miss a blog day. Then I started missing a few here and there, and, one day, I stopped writing all together.
It’s strange how it happened. I was editing a second draft of my WIP, and I broke through some of the slow pre-climax chapters. I was in an editing frenzy, getting through a chapter or more per day, and I got right up to the climax. Then, the next day, I got up and had no interest anymore. I was right where all the crazy action, reveals, and betrayals started spinning one after another. It should have been the coolest part to write… so why did I suddenly not want to think about the novel at all anymore?
And it got bad. I didn’t want to think about the novel. I tried starting a fresh story to take my mind off things. The writing looked nice, the scene was interesting, but I fizzled out and lost interest in that, too. Then I stopped wanting to think about writing at all.
I did other things. We moved, I interviewed for jobs, I went back to New Zealand for graduation ceremonies. I played a lot of League of Legends and had a 100% win rate as support Leona in ranked.
Every once in a while, I’d get a mild idea, something dim and distant that vaguely piqued my interest. It was like that scene in Ratatouille where Remy’s brother perceives the flavours he’s talking about, but they’re dull and quiet. Sometimes it was even a scene from my WIP. But I didn’t dwell on it for long, pushed it out of my mind, avoided actually going to Google Drive to see any of it. For months, I tucked writing away in a dark corner in my mind.
Somewhere in there, those mild curiosities started to stick. I started playing with scenes from my WIP, but only in my head. I didn’t worry about fixing them, but I relived some of the things I liked best. I started simply re-reading. No editing, just enjoying the story. And you know what? I liked it. I couldn’t see why I’d felt so bad about the quality of the ending.
The strangest thing is how it all ended. I was doing another one of those re-reads, when I ran into the chapter I’d stopped at initially. There was a blank space left open in the middle of the scene, where I’d gotten stuck for the day and gone to bed, only to never get up and come back to it. And as I was reading, without even batting an eye, I thought, “What? It doesn’t end there. There’s more.” And I just wrote it out like I was watching it happen.
I’d spent freaking forever not knowing how to get past that scene, and in retrospect, the uneasy feeling that the chapter was useless and meandering and melodramatic was what really held me back. I didn’t know how to fix it, and it was a crucial support beam to build the climax on, so the result was that the whole climax felt… unfounded. I thought I hated the climax and ending, but I think the issue was that the transition was poor, so the emotions didn’t flow from one portion of the book to another. It seems giving myself months of not thinking about it meant that when I came back and did a read-through, it was so much clearer what needed to happen, the direction that everything before that point had been heading. I needed that step back for the big picture.
After I broke through that chapter, the rest came in a flurry. I spent an entire day rewriting. Then every night that week. Then all of a sudden I was in the last chapter, and the second draft was finished. The novel was so much more complete. I could go back and polish, think about the little things that had been niggling me, and get to fixing those, too. So in one big whirlwind, I was back into the thick of things.
I know it won’t last. Sometimes I vacillate between loving and hating and loving again and hating again just in one day. I’ve been reading more, and other people’s brilliant books alternately inspire me to try and be better and depress me that I’ll never write so well. Such is the life of writing, I suppose. And as long as I get the novel out in the end, it doesn’t matter how many times I decided I hated it along the way, if I still have something I’m proud of to hold in my hands and put on my shelf at the end of the day.
Crackin' The WIP 