Update: Giving Myself Permission To Write

Okay...so it didn't go as planned. I guess I'm not quite ready to take up this advice. I started looking at my draft, and it's a mess.

There are scenes still written in third person pov/past tense, current scenes written in first person pov/present tense, scenes that have been planned but are unwritten, and gaping plot holes. Not to mention I still have no idea how this will end (okay, I have have some ideas - too many - that's the problem).

I've decided that the best way to clean this up is to move through the draft scene by scene from the beginning until all the scenes are written and updated, this time without looking back at scenes once I complete them.

Then I can read the first draft completely and figure out what issues need to be fixed.

The article still did some good though: it pushed me to start working on my draft again, something I haven't done in about a week.

Well, off to write!

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.