Wednesday, June 18, 2014

HOW DO YOU HANDLE SELF DOUBT WITH A DEADLINE LOOMING?


My guest is romance writer, Emily Greenwood. She focuses on something all writers (published or aspiring) have to deal with at some point or another: Self-Doubt. It's something that can stop a writer in their tracks or they can learn how to overcome it and still be successful.

What’s the hardest thing you've had to face as a writer? 

Self-doubt is probably the worst thing I deal with as a writer. 

And unfortunately, from what I know of my own experience and that of other writers, it doesn't go away, no matter how many years you put in.

For instance, while writing MISCHIEF BY MOONLIGHT, my current release, I felt certain I would never be able to finish the story—or at least not a story anyone would want to read, LOL.

I've been writing fiction for eight or nine years now, so I know it’s not always fun, that it’s work and sometimes you just have to soldier on and put words on the page. I know I’ll have to write a lot that will ultimately get thrown out because that’s my process.

But when I sat down to write MISCHIEF BY MOONLIGHT, the final book in my Regency Mischief series, I had nothing. Well, OK, I had a blurb that said the book was going to be about an earl in love with his best friend’s fiancée. The fiancée wanted to set him up with her sister, so she was going to give him a love potion and then realize that she had feelings for him herself. But that little paragraph I’d dreamed up when the book sold as part of a three-book series didn't inspire me now—it downright annoyed me!

Who cared about this Colin person, the hero, and whether he got together with Miss Josie Cardworthy? They didn't exist as the fleshed-out characters they now are, so there was nothing to love, no reason to care what would happen when Josie gave Colin a love potion. 

Every time I sat down at the computer, I wanted to jump up and run away. Doubt assailed me constantly: how would I ever come up with a 90 K story about these people? Who did I think I was?

  • What did you do and how did you over come it?
In between my disappointing efforts to put down words I surfed the internet, read other people’s books for “research,” scrubbed the bathroom floors with toothbrushes so I could make the grout sparkle, and made elaborate dinners for my family—anything to take me away from The Book That Was Never Going to Be Written.

I bought a book on procrastination, which told me that I wasn't procrastinating because I was lazy but because I perhaps had performance anxiety. That was possibly true—after all, I’d managed to write two books, why shouldn't I be able to write another one? But it didn't make me able to tell the story. I worried that I’d have to give back my advance.

So I got busy forcing myself and wrote page after terrible page. I signed up for NaNoWriMo, which I’d never done before, and made myself meet the daily word count. The pages were growing but the story didn't hang together at all, I still didn't care about these characters, and the deadline was getting closer.

So how did I write this story while self-doubt harassed me all day long? The answer isn't exciting. There was no magic cure. It was only this: 
I kept showing up and writing. That’s it. It was persistence, that boring, plodding quality that's probably the main thing that got me published to begin with. I just needed more of it than I ever had before.

  • What did did you learn?
It took a lot of hard work to write Mischief, and that’s what writing is—work. Sometimes it’s joyful work, when the words are flowing from some unknown source, and sometimes it’s nothing but a slog through the marshes of discouragement. 

I’m very proud of MISCHIEF BY MOONLIGHT now. I hope readers will find MISCHIEF funny and bittersweet and sexy and true. 

I’m really happy that I didn't let self-doubt stop me from writing it!

                                                                                                                                                                                  

With the night so full of romance...
Colin Pearce, the Earl of Ivorwood, never dreamed he'd desire another man's fiancée, but when his best friend goes off to war and asks Colin to look after the bewitching Josie Cardworthy, he falls under her sparkling spell.
Who can resist mischief?
Josie can't wait for the return of her long-absent fiancé. If only her beloved sister might find someone, too...someone like the handsome, reserved Colin. A gypsy's love potion gives Josie the chance to matchmake, but the wild results reveal her own growing passion for the earl. And though fate offers them a chance, a steely honor may force him to reject what her reckless heart is offering...


                                                                                                                                                     
Emily Greenwood worked for a number of years as a writer, crafting newsletters and fundraising brochures, but she far prefers writing playful love stories set in Regency England, and she thinks romance is the chocolate of literature. A Golden Heart finalist, she lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.
-Author websitehttp://emilygreenwood.net/