Writing a Novel

[qelenhn]

I wish I had the discipline to turn my novel into one that people will want to read. I fear I will give up before I reach that point. I have given up before reaching that point, so many times. What's going to make this time different? More importantly, how do I get the ideas in my head onto paper? My prose isn't horrible, people have given me good comments. But I can see something in my mind so clearly and yet stare at the screen for hours unable to make it come out the way it is in my head. Maybe the Ritalin will help. I do suspect organization of thoughts is part of the problem, as is staying on one train of thought. But to what degree are those thought patterns wired into my brain, having made it to the age of 34 before getting diagnosed? Will I really be able to overcome years of being this way by medication alone? Then again, I finished the first draft. And the second. Why is the third so much harder? No, I know the answer to that. It's because I don't want to have to do a fourth. There's a "this is it" mentality that makes it harder to meet my own standards. Last time if the scene wouldn't come out exactly like it was in my head I'd muddle through and come up with an approximation. This time I'm paralyzed by the need for it to be right. But the thing is, I really don't want to do this again. If I don't give myself a hard deadline I won't get anything done, Ritalin or not. Procrastination is embedded in my bones. But with a deadline it's kinda hard to be a perfectionist.

In other news, the last version of chapter 2 is significantly better than I thought it was. Maybe I'll get lucky and that will be true of later chapters.

I do know that part of the problem is that this is the first thing I've tried to do in my life that was well and truly difficult. School? Easy to moderately challenging. Work? Easy to somewhat annoying. Writing well? Extremely challenging. My lack of experience at being this frustrated and capable of failure surely compounds the problem.