[Link] When Your Process Isn't Working for You, Change Your Process

by Chuck Wendig

That’s it, that’s the lesson. I said it in the post headline. You can go home now.

OKAY FINE WAIT don’t go home.

So, it is once again National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, and maybe you’re doing it, maybe you’re not, maybe you’ll succeed at the task, maybe you will be overwhelmed by holiday stress and global chaos, maybe you’ll be eaten by bears, I don’t know you, I don’t know your life.

What I know is this:

When writing, and that’s true for this month or any other month, it is entirely acceptable to blow up your process with a variety of metaphorical explosives. We all think we know how we do things. We think we know how we write. We think we know how we tell stories. Over time we super-glue ourselves to our process, and in fact that process can become a part of us in a problematic way as we mythologize and even fetishize said process. (Weirder still, we will then sometimes attempt to turn our process from mythology and fetish to straight-up cult and religion — look no further than any TEN WAYS YOU MUST WRITE, YOU FUCKING HEATHEN lists.) I’m guilty of this as anybody, to be clear! I definitely put a ring on my process and stayed married to it long beyond its value. Hell, the very start of my novel-writing career was born out of me shedding some rather foolish ideas I had about my process and the wifty head-in-clouds notions that governed it at the time.

And now I’ve used ‘process’ far too many times.

Process, process, process. Princess abcess praxis.

*clears throat, tries to escape this linguistic oubliette*

Anyway, my point is ultimately this: you’re gonna eventually hit a speedbump or even a wall where you discover that the Way You Write is simply no longer working.

Read the full article: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2023/11/02/when-your-process-isnt-working-for-you-change-your-process/