reverb 10, day 13 – action

From December 13th: When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?

My biggest aspiration is the same as it’s always been – finish a goddamned novel, and polish it up enough that I can start submitting it to agents.

I currently have at least half a dozen partially finished novels sitting on my hard drive. I start something, I get 10K, 20K, 30K – even 50K, for the one story I wrote for NaNoWriMo – into the draft before I go “shit, this SUCKS, I hate it, it’s never going to amount to anything” and back away. No matter how hard I try or how many times I remind myself that it’s necessary, I remain terrified of the shitty first draft. I was always a one-draft writer in school; I’m a good enough writer that my one-draft papers, knocked out the night before the assignment was due, were usually good enough to net me an A. I was never forced to develop the discipline to write, analyze, revise, and rework. It’s become a problem nowadays.

So, the next step? I have a list of concrete things I know I need to do. I have my eye on one of my incomplete novels – I reread my scene outline the other night, and it’s needlessly complex, with too many characters and not enough explanation of my two main characters’ motivations. I need to tear the outline apart and put it back together with more focus. I need to do a little research to make the magic system I’m creating for the story seem a little more believable. And then, I need to write. And write. And write. Until it’s done.

In a larger sense, though, my next step really needs to be figuring out a way to defeat this fear of failure, to conquer my lack of discipline. I need to figure out how to stop comparing my writing to other people’s. I need to figure out how to not let others’ opinions on the kind of story I love to write affect how I feel about my own work. What kind of actions can I take to accomplish this? Damned if I know. I’m open to suggestions! How do you deal with this sort of fear?