we all have that 'moment'...

TK Roxborogh's comment on my last post reminded me of a past post I wrote about reaching that moment when you decide your novel is the biggest load of c(beep)p the world has ever come across. My old post was in response to something I read on this blog (Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room) but I can't remember when it was - sorry folks (I'll have a rootle round and see if i can find a link). I think this reaction, this self-doubt, this loss of faith in your own writing probably happens to around 95% of all writers. I know it happens to me. Usually more then once per story but not the entire time I'm writing it. Most often it happens just over half way, near the end and when I'm editing it and in that moment I know my story couldn't blow any harder than it does and that was the biggest waste of (three months, six months, 9 months, a year, 2 years, some other length of time, select as appropriate). In that moment you wonder how you ever thought you could write. In that moment you know you will never show the story to another living soul. In that moment your heart sinks and you want to cry. But (and this is my favourite part) you keep writing, finish the story and edit it till its done and 99 times out of 100 that love for what you've written comes back and months later you'll read a bit at random and think - ok, maybe I can do this and in THAT foolhardy moment you print it and post it or e-mail it to an agent/publisher and you enter a totally different phase of this masochistic business. What reading ill-written best-sellers teaches me (when its not teaching me that the world works in mysterious ways) is that my writing isn't the cr(beep)eist there is.

I have been in a bit of a 'moment' recently whilst editing my latest completed WIP. When I originally began this story some years back I had a particular key plot element woven through the story which eventually became an albatross around its neck. The plot element had withered away along the course of the story and had to be surgically removed if the story was going to survive. It took me awhile but I figured out how to fill in the holes left by the surgey and I subsequently completed the tale. Then this morning i decided to put this plot element back. The story was missing something and I now understood how to make it work. Its the right thing to do but I do feel a certain sense of frustration that I had to go through this entire process to reach this conclusion. I am now looking at a mountain of work and fell a little daunted by the climb but I've invested too much time and effort in a manuscript which I think has some potential. If you see a dent in my head its just because i've been bashing it against a brick wall!