I have never written a book that I didn’t get bored with, somewhere in the middle. I think this happens to a lot of writers. The excitement of a new project has worn off, the end is a long way away, and you have read, re-read, thought and re-thought so much about it that if you weren’t bored there would be something wrong with you.
In the past, when this happened as I was writing my own “stuff”, I would often take a break. (To be honest, sometimes I still do.) I’d put whatever I was bored with away, and start something else – something shiny, exciting, and new. The downside to this is that I might never come back to it, or come back years later, when the momentum had to be built up all over again – and guess what, another spate of boredom would ensue in the middle, so I had really gained nothing. Yet another downside is that I always had a niggling in the back of my mind that a story wasn’t being told, that should be.
In fact, I can’t think of many upsides to taking a break, except the short term one of regaining needed energy – and this is only an upside if you use that energy to jump back into the project soon.
I discovered another way of handling this awful boredom when I began ghostwriting, when breaks were not an option. I couldn’t tell my client that I was bored with his or her book and was “taking a break” – not if I wanted to keep my clients, that is. So instead I slogged through the boring middle piece, sure in my soul that I was writing the dullest prose known to human kind. But an amazing thing happened: the enthusiasm came back, the prose wasn’t so dull after all, and the final third of the book slid off my fingers as if it were greased.
Slogging through boredom takes courage, faith, and trust. I’ll probably never love this segment of book-writing, but I now know that it is just part of the process, sort of a test to see how dedicated I really am. Why should the universe take me seriously if a little boredom can make me quit?
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Does any of this sound familiar? “What am I even doing here? Who’s even going to want to read this? Does anyone even care? I am crap!” Sigh. (My antidote: “You may be crap, but you still have to write these pages today. Just fake it and see what you think in revisions.” Courage and blind faith–you got it!)
signed,
ConneryBeagle’s mom
It sure does sound familiar — I guess the critical voices in my head and the critical voices in yours went to the same school. I wonder if Connery or Goody hear the beagle version of these critical voices – “you’re never going to catch that rabbit.” “bloodhounds can smell better than you, so why even try?” “who cares about a stupid blue ribbon in those agility trials.” Somehow I don’t think so. Dogs know that the meaning is in the doing.
I am quite certain that ConneryBeagle rarely hears anything but, “GO ME!” and “BAWHSOME, COOKIES!”, maybe with the occasional squeaky toy noise interspersed. But I try hard to keep it that way. One of me in the family is enough!