I won't go into the specifics, but my
writing efforts have temporarily been detoured form my novel concept
to a short story concept (unrelated projects).
I am having a lot of fun with it, but I
was getting hung up on the ending (I'm not finished it yet, I just
don't necessarily write chronologically...). Conceptually I was fine
with what I wanted to do, but my executions were just not working for
me. I tinkered and tweaked it for much longer than I probably should
have and was still unhappy with it. I began to worry that it was
just a bad idea that no amount of rewriting would be able to correct
for.
I finally went to one of my best
sounding boards. I gave my wife a brief summary of the important
points on the ending concept and she said she didn't see any inherent
problems with it as a concept (please note my wife is very critical
of my writing, she does not pull punches or sugar coat things and I
adore her for this). While that was a relief to me it brought me
back to my execution being the problem.
Fortunately I remembered I've had
similar feeling about individual scenes from my novel project (Which
I clearly did not internalize enough or this would have come to me
sooner). And in those past circumstances I was able to find
something I liked through repeated attempts to write the scene anew.
Each time I would change something. Perhaps start the scene with a
different character speaking, or start with a description, or maybe
change the point of view. Each attempt being a different expression
of the same basic plot points.
As in the past, I finally hit upon one
that clicked with me. If I had to boil this experience down into a
quick lesson it would be: Sometimes you will have better results
completely starting over, multiple times if necessary, than tinkering
with something that just isn't working.
