A Sceond Chance for Writers

Have you ever had a bad writing day? If you answered No, I'm not sure I believe you. Every writer has bad days. You know the kind. The days when nothing seems to work. Start a new piece of writing, and the whole thing is just blah. A blob of garbage. You work on a problem area, and it's still a problem. No solution popped up.

Send a submission and then realize you didn't follow the guidelines. Receive one or more rejections on work submitted earlier. Get a long awaited critique from a writing group only to find the person wants you to revise so much that you might as well start from scratch. The list could go on and on.

All of the above and more are snags. They're bumps in the road. They're barriers put up to keep us from being a success. At least, that is what it feels like to the writer who is confronted with the ordinary problems of our craft. 

Yes, they are nothing strange. Writers meet these and other blips all the time. The important thing to do is to confront them, one at a time.  Our poster today tells us that we always get a second chance. It's called 'tomorrow.' If you set aside whatever the problem area is until the next day, two things might happen. 1. The problem might not seem quite so awful the next day and 2. You can approach it with a different view on this second day. 

Some of us tend to run headfirst into trying to solve a writing problem. Letting it sit at least overnight, if not longer, helps us to view the situation in a different light. The problem hasn't gone away, but maybe your viewpoint has changed from the day before when you were upset. Those old posters from England that started with 'Keep calm and...' had some good advice. Getting riled up doesn't help you solve the problem, whatever it might be.

I've written many times in blog posts that you should let a first draft sit a day, several days, or even longer. You'll see it with different eyes when you pull it out and work on it again. It's the same with problems in your writing life.  

Be patient and be willing to let a writing problem sit at least overnight before you tackle it. It's a second chance we're given to right what is wrong. It doesn't mean everything will be prefect the next day. Only in our dreams! But we do find some opportunity to make things better by waiting instead of attacking it ferociously on the day the problem occurs.