Sometimes writing goes fast and is truly enjoyable. Other times I get knocked over by a chapter (of my book or an online story) where, no matter how many edits I do, things just don’t work out and I fall into this near infinite loop of writing and editing and rewriting and reediting. This is what happened this week.
The third chapter of my Wattpad story, which is now available here, took me nearly two weeks to finish. In the end I had to post it without a third edit because of how sick I was of working on it. It was the hardest writing project I had in a very long time. I had to go over every paragraph of the original draft multiple times just to get it right. As a person who’s been writing for over 20 years, I am no stranger to the hard practice of writing. I have experienced it many times before. However, this was a short piece, from a story I truly love, and it took much longer than it had any right to for me to finish. I’m not sure if it was because I am a better writer now, and therefore more demanding of myself, or because I only think I am a better writer when in truth, I’m no different than the amateur scribble bug I was 20 years ago.