Elizabeth Gootzeit

Like a good many writers, I haven’t always been the best at completing projects. As a kid I did the thing where I would crack open a brand new notebook and get a page or two down of an exciting new idea. Once I transitioned to writing on a computer, I repeated the process digitally, spawning endless Word documents that might contain all of a paragraph—if that. (At least many notebooks’ worth of trees were spared.)

I believe the first novel(la?) I finished was in middle school(?) Somewhere around that time I discovered fanfiction, too, and I actually did finish a fairly substantial fic or two…

For the most part, however, I walked through life with stories unfurling in my mind, mentally inhabiting my made-up worlds and taking my characters through their paces. This daydreaming is an integral part of the process, of course, and I have stories gestating this way in my subconscious as I write this. Still.

If you resolve to get your story “done,” you have to get it down. Something. Anything.

I struggled with this for a long time, as I have that lovely procrastinator/perfectionist sort of brain. So even if I do sit down to work, perfectionism rears its ugly head. The way I used to write, I would go over and over again what I had already written, continuously editing everything before making the most incremental progress. Then there would be more to edit, and so on. I did finish some work this way, but it’s not the most sustainable way of doing things.

To make a story really take shape, you need the big picture. And you can’t look at that big picture if it doesn’t exist. As a pantser, I was always starting over with a new idea that carried me, well, exactly as far as it carried me. Maybe that ended in a complete short story, or even a novella. Most often it didn’t. I hadn’t really discovered developmental editing yet.

I’ll save more process talk for future posts, so I’ll wrap things up here.

My process, like everything else, is a work in progress.