Giving Myself Permission To Write

This blog post from Writer Unboxed couldn't have come at a better time.

"I rode on the write-edit-write-edit carousel, which meant a year later I was still plotting out my story while editing at the same time. This might work for some, but it stalled my progress. I was caught in an endless loop that meant I wrote at a snail’s pace.
In order to write that fast I had to learn to get the story, and only the story, down. When I hit a patch that my internal snail frothed to focus on, I made a note and kept going. It was freeing.
The drafts of my story became easier to write when I could assign their purpose. First draft: get my crazy ideas on paper; second and third drafts: edit and refine."

I have been stuck in this endless "write-edit-write-edit" loop as well for the past few months, and it took this blog post dumping a bucket of icy water over my head to jolt me out of it.

Why can't I give myself permission to write?

I know my characters aren't developed enough yet, and I know there are plot holes. But I think that at the moment it's more important for me to finish an entire first draft than it is to get the existing parts closer to per***t.

Tonight, I'm giving myself permission to write the next scene in TGITP (not to continue rewriting one of the scenes from the beginning). To hold myself to this promise, I'll update soon with how it went.

Murder Your Darlings

I first heard this phrase when I was reading On Writing by Stephen King.

"Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."
-Stephen King, On Writing 

At first the advice didn't make much sense to me. Why would I want to kill the best parts of my story? But I think I finally understand.

Last month I was about 30,000 words into my first draft of TGITP (aka the book I'm currently working on), when I realized that about 20,000 words in the middle didn't need to be there. Now, don't get me wrong, I needed to write them. They showed me where my main character needed to end up, and they taught me a lot about the world she's living in. However, they didn't add to the overall story. It was tough, but I ended up cutting them and finding a much better, much quicker way to get her from the inciting incident to where the story really begins.

And now I think I understand what it means to murder your darlings. I certainly had darlings in those 20,000 words. In fact, I had two very real darlings who were characters that I axed, as well as a few plot points I was excited about. To me, murdering your darlings doesn't mean killing off the best parts of your story, it means killing off the parts that, although you may love, don't add to the story you really need to be telling at that moment.