Obsessing

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Writing is a complicated balancing act. It’s not just a two-factor problem—this much dialog versus that much action. It’s dialog balanced against action balanced against description balanced against characterization; pacing vs. clarity vs. structure vs. depth; outlining vs. drafting vs. revising.

The thing about complicated balancing acts is that that they are complicated. They don’t balance like a set of scales; they balance like a hanging mobile with several arms holding objects of different sizes and weights. No two objects balance each other, but collectively, they work. More than that, when the wind blows or something nudges the mobile, it moves in interesting ways but never gets too far out of balance, eventually returning to its original state.

It is perilously easy for writers to focus on one aspect of writing as “THE key thing,” and end up losing sight of the balance. Sometimes, the “key” is something they think is desirable; sometimes it’s something they want to avoid at all costs. In my experience, the “key” is always something that sounds like a really good thing to do or avoid—“write cool things,” “don’t be obvious,” “keep up the pace,” “don’t bore the reader,” “use an outline,” “do something unexpected,” and so on. (If those examples sound like standard writing advice, there’s a reason…)

The reason this is perilous is that a writer who fixates on one thing can easily lose sight of the balancing act. One of the arms of the mobile becomes so heavy that none of the others can balance it out, and the whole thing collapses in a tangle. Or the writer loses sight of what their focus means for a reader. What the writer thinks is obvious, after living with the characters and plot for months or years, may be incomprehensible to readers who are encountering them for the first time. What bores the writer, who has spent weeks wrestling with that mid-book turning point scene, may be fascinating for a reader who is galloping through the whole story in hours or days. What seems slow to the writer, who took weeks to get through that scene or chapter, may feel too fast for a reader who’s only spending minutes or an hour on it.

What all these things have in common is that they are the right thing to worry about for some stories and/or some writers, but they’re not right for all stories or writers. Furthermore, constantly obsessing about a single aspect of writing is the kind of perfectionism that nearly always results in neglecting other aspects, to the detriment of the whole. Eventually, it becomes the writer’s go-to solution for every problem, resulting in the writing equivalent of trying to use a hammer to saw boards and screw in screws.

Realizing one is worrying about the same thing all the time is probably the first step, but solutions can be as tricky as the problem. As I said, the kinds of things writers obsess about—whether they’re must-do or don’t-ever—can be real problems. Sometimes. So one can’t simply say “Oh, I’m worried about being too obvious/not using enough cool ideas/being predictable again; that’s just me, so I can ignore it.” Because once in a while, the thing really is a problem. After all, there’s a reason the writer got obsessed with it in the first place.

There’s also the issue of swinging too far in the opposite direction—in trying to be clearer (the fix for obsessing over “being too obvious), the writer over-explains, slowing the pace and making readers feel condescended to. Or in trying to be more interesting (the fix for obsessing over “being boring”), the writer introduced more characters and plot twists than the story can support.

So the first thing I tend to do is to check what stage of the book I’m at. I don’t mean beginning-middle-end; I mean whether, when I talk to other people, I’m calling it “The book,” “The work-in-process,” “The darn book,” “The damned book,” “The damned book from hell,” or…well, there are several more vulgar adjectives that get added, one at a time (some of them only ever in my head). I consider them technical descriptions of what stage I’m at; anything at Stage 4 (“The damned book”) or higher means my judgement is questionable, and I shouldn’t make any permanent changes until I calm down.

This doesn’t mean ignoring whatever I’m worried about. It means not doing anything about it YET. So I make a note—either in a separate document or as a comment in the manuscript, and keep going. These are not specific things like “need to hang gun over mantlepiece somewhere in Ch 1-4” (because I suddenly need it in Ch 14, and haven’t planted it yet). They’re more general worries like “Is viewpoint character pondering too long here?” “Is this scene repetitive?” “Purple prose warning?” “Is this clear enough, or does it go too far & look like I’m condescending to readers?”

In other words, this isn’t stuff I’m sure I need to change—I do those as rolling revision every couple of chapters. These are things I’m worried about to the point of obsession, not things I actually think are a problem. If the list gets too long by the time I feel like I’m about two-thirds done with the rough draft, I’ll go back and rewrite; otherwise, I wait until the draft is done, and go through them on a pass through the whole manuscript.

This lets me get an overview of the whole story before I make drastic changes to pacing, structure, characterization, etc. It also gives me the assurance that I won’t forget something that really is a problem, as well as telling that nervous part of my brain “You always obsess about this thing, so it’s probably not a problem, but we’ll look at it again later, when we’re not operating in OMG-it’s-terrible mode.”

Beta readers can also be helpful for this, but only if the writer trusts their advice enough to actually believe it. I find it most useful when I have five or six beta readers who can all say “I didn’t think it was confusing at all” or “what purple prose?” or “actually, the pacing is already kind of fast.” When a whole bunch of people outvote my Internal Editor, it’s easier to accept.

Either way, by the time I go back through the manuscript to actually do some revisions, I’m a lot more rational (because the draft is finished), and 90% of the time, I can just erase the worry-comments. (The other 10% of the time, there’s actually a problem, though quite often it is not the one I was worried about…but that’s a different issue.)