One of the many websites for writers to which I subscribe is the Insecure Writers Support Group. I’d been writing for several years when I ran across this site. Of course, like all writers, I am insecure.
I don’t remember how I found the Insecure Writers Support Group nor what first attracted me to it. I subscribe to so many writing newsletters that unless a headline particularly strikes me, I often do not read them.
But I read a recent post in the Insecure Writers Support Group mentioning their monthly question for writers to write (and post) about on the first Wednesday of every month. Today is a first Wednesday, and soI will take up the challenge.
Actually, I will take up their challenge for two months—June and July.
The June question was: When the going gets tough writing the story, how do you keep yourself writing to the end?
This is a good question for insecure writers to ponder. I remember when I had completed the first draft of my first novel (a contemporary corporate thriller I published under a pseudonym), and I wondered, What do I do next? I had about 120,000 words, there was some plot, and lots of characters, but it didn’t feel like a novel. (I was only just learning about novel structure.)
I gave the draft to a couple of friends to read. When I got their feedback, I was flummoxed. I agreed with their critiques, but I had no idea how to shape the mass of words I had created into a novel’s structure and address the other criticisms with my very rough draft. About three weeks later, I’d processed my readers’ comments enough to have some idea of what the next draft needed to have in it. So I plowed in.
It took plodding through several more drafts before I had that novel to the point where I didn’t think I could do any more with it. Just finish a draft, then go back to the beginning and start again. Over and over, each time refining what I had. Then after another round of beta readers and more editing, I published it.
Plowing in and plodding along seem to be my best techniques for getting to the end. Write, rinse, repeat.
The Insecure Writers Support Group question for July is: What book world would you like to be in?
That question stopped me. Surely, I should want to be in the fictional world I have created of the American West in the mid-19th century. But actually, I have no desire to live in that world. I like indoor plumbing too much. That means my ideal world must be in the late 20th or early 21st centuries—my real world.
But I would like to live near a beach. I think my ideal world would be in one of those women’s fiction books set in a summer house on a beach. There are many such book worlds. Any of them would do. Some stories focus on family tragedies, some houses are haunted, some contain crime scenes. I’d put up with quite a bit of angst and violence to live on a beach.
What about you? What book world would you like to be in? And are you an insecure writer?
Theresa, You know me, and like you I’m always insecure about words on the page. I do know that I love my characters. Strong, beautiful, smart women. Would I have the guts to be one of my female characters? At one point in life, probably. My favorite is Catalina Syrah: art historian, CIA agent, beautiful and gutsy.
Pam, even if you wouldn’t be one of your characters, would you live in their world?
Theresa
I’m with you Theresa. I’d like to live in a coastal location in a Victorian era mansion where paranormal experiences occur and one encounters shadow figures, cold spots, and bumps into one of the long deceased occupants on the staircase.
Cindy, the Victorian era mansion would be fine, so long as it’s been modernized with indoor plumbing. But spare me the paranormal incidents! Theresa
I used to think that Kansas City, where my grandmother lived, was the center of the world. Now I know that is not true. It’s really London, where I have dreamed of living on Crooked Usage Street. About two blocks long, with crowded together three-storey houses, off Hendon Lane in Finchley.
Wow! That’s specific. I haven’t been in London in many years, but I loved it. A good choice.
Theresa
As a fellow writer of historical novels, I agree with you. I love those times and places, but every evening I want to return to a hot bath with tap water, to cook in my modern kitchen, etc. Of course I would like living in our times somewhere close to the sea, preferably on a Greek island or on the Spanish coast.
Your ideal place sounds idyllic.