Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Let's workshop this a little.

I've been working on a couple of things, two long short stories trying to make them into novellas and I'll be getting edits back on the novel soonish that are going to require a fair amount of rewriting. One of the authors in my virtual meet up was told to delete X number of characters and really rework her story to have a better chance of being picked up. In all those cases it would need some substantial rewrites. My fellow author did it with little hesitation.

On the other hand I find myself struggling with any of them. My brain sees something as DONE and once it sees that, getting it to do anything major. Last week in ushobwri brumeier said something about their brain taking an outline as 'the story is done, no need to do more.' And I was like YES. This is why I don't like outlining.

But I can't use those long short stories as is. If I could get them to novella length, I could try to market them. I will have to add description and whatever to the 1980s novel and I'm already paralyzed thinking about it, mostly because it's already too long so what do I remove in order to do this? I have another finished novel that needs deep edits to be usable. I have nearly 20 years worth of nano novels sitting in folders because once I hit 50K the brain is like, that was the goal.


So how do YOU motivate yourself to finish something or rework it once your brain says 'this is done.' Maybe this doesn't happen to you. I rather hope it doesn't. But if it does, how do you handle it?


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