What To Do When Your Story Has 11 Fingers – Day 332

Got an hour in today. Inspired writing, I thought.

But is it really?

I’ve talked in these pages before that sometimes I have no idea if what I’m writing is any good.

However this is kept me going: I remember back in the day, I would be nervous about my day-job writing, especially if it was something new for me. (In fact, it was the things I was most confident about that turned out to be the stinkers… having a good feeling was a bad sign, apparently.)

These days, I can be pretty objective about my writing, excise the crap from the good stuff, and be confident that the stuff I’m writing is doing what I set out for it to do.

But still not in my novel writing. That’s okay though — I think that as I progress as a novelist, that too will come.

Rex Pickett said it this way though:

The hard part is when you give birth to something and then it has 11 fingers or whatever. You don’t know what it is… but you have no choice, you have to go to the world with it.

“You don’t know what it is…” does that mean you never get perspective on your own work? Outside opinion will certainly always be important, especially when you’re working on something as big and as sweeping as a novel. I hope, at least, that I’ll be able to have a better sense of what is working and what is not in the future.

Until then, I’ll just enjoy the fact that it is all working bang on, thank you very much. Helps to keep the confidence up anyway, eh?

~Graham

Here’s the video the quotation comes from:

Novel Writing Totals

Today: 1 hour
To date: 158.5