My friend and client J.A. Pitts has an interesting guest post on Grasping for the Wind today about something I’ve recently learned:
The Necessity of Blindness is that aspect of a writer who cannot see the flaws in their work at first. I finish a story, and send it to my first readers, praying it holds together, that the beginning, middle, and end all align to the point that the reader has a fulfilling experience.
About one half of the way through my recent novel attempt (finished last Saturday, by the way), I started to really worry about how bad it was. I started to lose my blindness to the flaws and it really slowed me down (relatively speaking). I got basically “stuck” at a lull between rising action arcs and was worried that everything I was doing was just terrible. The voice in my head said “give up.”
Luckily, the voice in my head that demands I stick to my schedule was stronger this time around, and after some tinkering, I was able to power through it.
Right now, I’m still thinking about the book a lot–mostly, again, how much it sucks. I’m slowly building a list of how I might go about fixing various parts that I don’t like. But I’m not editing the book yet. I’m waiting for my blindness to fall away, as John suggests, so that I can see the book more clearly. I’m pretty sure it’ll be both as bad as not as bad as I expect. But at least I’ll be able to see it clearly.
Tags: JA Pitts, My Writing, necessity of blindness, novels
