Potholes in Your Writing Journey

 

After winter is over, we deal with numerous potholes in our roads. We swerve around them or avoid the streets that boast the most. 

Not that I said 'swerve around them' and 'avoid...' which is exactly what we should do when we hit potholes in our writing journey. Be assured that you are going to run across them. Our writing pothole appear when we hit a snag of some sort in our writing life. It happens to all of us. Some of those indentations are deeper and bigger than others. We can deal with the little ones, but when one of the biggies comes along, our journey might come to a screeching halt, at least for a while.

Potholes come our way in the form of rejections from a publisher, a story that seemed great in your mind but turns out rather lame when you write it, or a problem in a story that you can't seem to resolve. Maybe you have written a story or essay that satisfies you a lot, but you cannot find the right market for it. Perhaps your story idea is great, but the mechanics when it is written are in need of help. So many parts of our writing life can result in a pothole. 

The important thing is to keep moving; don't let each pothole slow your journey, or stop it altogether. If your confidence in your writing is on the low side, it's pretty easy to let these problems stop you for some time or forever. 

What should you do when you hit one of these potholes? As our poster says, 'stop worrying.' There is nothing that cannot be fixed or dumped and restarted. 

Writers are not alone in having to fix a problem. Quilters pull out stitches and redo their work when it doesn't measure up. Painters paint over problem areas or start a new canvas. Landscapers redo sections that don't measure up to their standards. Why should writers be any different? We cut, revise, and edit over and over until we are satisfied. 

When you hit a portion of the writing road that has potholes, swerve if they aren't big ones. When you come across a large problem, stop and work on it until you're satisfied and can move on.