You’re writing away, in the throes of creation. The plan is one document, your project in another, and you’re getting your thoughts onto the page. Maybe it’s taken you months to get to this point, perhaps even years. However long it’s been, at long last, what you’ve been working on is coming to life on the page before you.
But you feel it, a sensation in your very bones, a whisper in the back of your mind: something isn’t working. An inevitable change has arisen.
The world, the characters and their motivations, maybe the story itself, you’ve come across something that needs strengthening, or there’s something about your story that isn’t what you need it to be. It could be something minor you have to tweak, or it could be a major overhaul; a character isn’t coming across the way you want so you’ll need to shift all their dialogue, or an entire subplot just isn’t adding anything and needs to either be rewritten or gotten rid of entirely. Whatever it is, you can feel the project needs work, and you’re not going to be satisfied with the story until it’s done.
The question is, do you work on that now, or do you wait? Do you grind yourself to a halt, work on whatever needs work, and then continue on the strengthened project? Or do you keep going, aware change is coming, but pressing forward anyway, getting the story onto the page and strengthening it later?
Ultimately, it’s a matter of process, how you work best. And maybe this sort of thing happens more to pantsers than plotters, though niggles and barriers come up with all stories, whether you’ve plotted it down to the finer details or go with whatever flow comes your way. Whichever kind of writer you are, when these sorts of things arise, there’s a decision to be made.
For me, I push on. It’s the way I work, the pantser in me. I do plot, I couldn’t go into something without any sort of plan. But my plans are somewhat loose. If I’m in a chapter and what I’ve decided for the end of it just isn’t going to work or even be reached, then it gets delayed or moved around. If I’m working away and I get a sudden idea for how things can fit together better later on, I keep going, letting that idea guide me wherever it wants me to go.
Maybe, for us pantsers out there, this is a problem that arises more often than for our plotter counterparts; if you’ve planned out things to their finest detail, perhaps troublesome characters or tricky subplots rear their heads much more rarely. There are benefits to both kinds of writing; plotters get their niggles straightened out in the plotting stage, but pantsers find it easier to charge forward with their writing, delaying and procrastinating less (these are just speculations, of course. Each writer is unique, and their process, their quirks, their flaws are as individual as the writer themselves).
Back to the problem at hand, however, to what you do when the inevitable change has been shown to you, and you’ve got to decide when to work on it. As I said earlier, I press on. For me, drafts are completed as a run through of the entire work. You can see me mention this in previous posts, but this does mean that, on occasion, I might be writing something, realise a character isn’t working, and get rid of them. Do I then go back to the very start, rewrite what I’ve written, and then keeping going once I got to the point where things weren’t working out in the first place?
No. I just keep going, erasing that character from the moment I decide they no longer suit the project. When I come back around for the next draft, that’s when I’ll erase them out of the manuscript entirely. For me, this will be the same when I insert characters, change subplots, perhaps even change elements of the overall plot itself. It’s how I work best, and whilst it sometimes means my drafts can be chaotic, I know they will smooth out the more drafts I do.
It’s not always an easy process, however. There are a couple of projects I’m working on now where I think the plot needs quite a major overhaul. I’m over 50,000 words in, but I know substantial work needs to be done in those words to make the piece stronger. Whilst I know my process is to push forward no matter what, that getting anything down onto the page makes it easier than having nothing to edit at all, I struggled this time. I knew the world needed work, and that the structure did as well, that it’s moving too slowly and the pacing isn’t right.
In all honesty, I did almost start over. Not from the very start, of course, but wanting to take the project back to the drawing board, indulge in the plotter side of me, wondering if the pantser was getting out of hand.
But I told myself, quite firmly, that I needed to push on. Half-finished drafts are much easier to abandon than completed ones. If I left it where it was, went back to the planning stage, I might not find it very difficult to let it sit in the back of my mind, work on something else. 50,000 words is nothing to scoff at, and if I was to let that sit there, in a half-completed document, I might find it too troublesome to tackle in the future.
So I pushed on, heavily acknowledging the areas that need work, and moving forward with the elements I liked. This isn’t a perfect process, there’s all sorts of ways this can go awry, potentially leading to thousands of redundant words, or maybe even stickier situations in the future.
But it works for me. In fact, in pushing forward, I’ve been able to see where the pace kicks up in the story, and it’s allowed me to see the moments that I need to reach faster. It’s taught me about which elements are working, and which ones aren’t. If I had let it go, gone back to planning, there’s nothing to say I wouldn’t have found solutions, but they might have been different ones. They might not be worse than what I’ve decided, and they might not be better either. But I’ve found my solutions, and that was because I pushed on, even when I got very close to calling it quits.
So what am I really saying here? Ultimately, it’s about following your own process. If you’re someone who simply can’t go on until everything is in its right place, then that’s how you write. If you’re like me and you feel like getting it onto the page is the best thing for you, even when you know there’s a lot of change coming, then that’s what you do. There is no better or worse. You might do a combination of the two. In fact, there might be some third option I’m not even considering, but this is really all about process, finding what gets you the results and the answers you need to make the story stronger.
With all stories, change is inevitable. Whether it’s in the early stages of plotting, the middle stage of writing, or in the late stage of editing (and perhaps even later when you’re working with an editor who is trying to mould your story and your vision into something that can be published), things are going to change. How you deal with the change you know is coming is an entirely individual process. The most important thing is finding a way that keeps you going, a way that allows you to complete your work. It’s so easy to see hurdles and be too afraid or too unprepared to jump, and if you stop completely, I think it’s much harder to get yourself going again.
So keep going. Whether that means pushing on even though change is sitting in the back of your mind, or taking a story back to the planning stage, make sure you do it. An unfinished project can be a haunting thing (even when it’s the right thing to do, an entirely different conversation I’ve broached in previous posts), so giving it your best effort, keeping up that momentum in whatever way suits you, that’s how we make sure our stories get told. After all, we want these stories to be told. So making sure we give them the attention they require, whether that’s pushing them on in the face of change or hauling them back to the start to whip them into shape, that’s how we ensure they’ll be out there one day, for other people to read.
Robyn x
R. A. Howard 