Sometimes, you just need to step back and take a break. You’re too close to your project and it’s getting hard to keep scrutinizing every aspect of it; and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you’ve have enough of a project for a while; it’s probably even healthy. There is a limit to how much attention you can devote to any one thing at a time. It’s only a matter of time before you get sick of your project and never want to see it again; you might want to take a break from it before you reach that point. You don’t want to be shoving your hard work into a corner and never looking at it again. That’d be the last thing any of us wants for something you cared about enough to work on it like that.
Take some time to work on something else. Maybe you’ve had a short story on the back burner. Maybe you’ve always wanted to make a poetry anthology. Maybe you want to write a comprehensive look on why Rick Deckard would have been better off as an Android (don’t take that, it’s mine). Whatever it is, go ahead and take the time to do it. If you’re at all like me, you’ve probably got 80 other projects calling you that you enjoy working on from time to time; give them some attention, they could be your next triumph.
It could be that you want nothing to do with writing for a while. That’s okay too. Read a good book. Catch up on that TV show you’ve been putting off for a while. Go to the movies. (If you’re in school, I guess like, do homework or something, whatever, I don’t do that stuff, don’t be like me, kids.) Do something to give your brain a little time to recharge and get over the starry-eyed wonder of beating your personal literary demon into submission. You’ll need a fresh mind to come back to your work.
And that’s the important part. You need to come back to your work. Don’t get sucked into the comfort of having a finished product and then not doing anything with it. Even if you ultimately decide that you never want it to see the light of day, you’ve got to give it a decent chance. I mean, you put so much time and effort into something, you can’t just leave it hidden away forever; it deserves a bit more of your attention, if only to be deemed unusable.
Because that could very well happen. I can’t tell you the number to half-finished works I’ve come back to only to find that it looked to be written by a ten-year-old (accurate, but still) and just tossed it. The characters were poorly thought-out, the story was baseless and had plot holes bigger than me, and the dialogue was simply atrocious. It’s a hard thing to accept that your work wasn’t always awesome (well, it was for me, because I’m always awesome). But sometimes, it’s the only way to grow out of your bad habits and grow as a writer. You are your hardest critic, and sometimes you’re exactly what you need. Sometimes, you need to just sit down with your work and give it your harshest revue. Because that is the only thing that can really help you get anywhere as a writer. If you can’t criticise yourself, you’ll never get anywhere.
You also need to be willing to take others’ advice on your work. If you can’t take criticism, you have no business trying to be an author. Criticism is at least half of your work. You’ll not only have editors to contend with, but also the general populace who’ll be reading your work. You’ve got to get prepared for that, and the only way to do that is to dive headfirst and ask someone to read it and give you feedback. Who knows? You could have written something amazing. You will probably have a lot of work to do, but you’ll be much better off than those people who won’t let anyone touch their work for fear of hearing criticisms. And that’s an amazing thing.
Basically, it’s good to take a break before getting to the dirty work of editing. But make damn sure you do get back to it. Do it and get awesome. Godspeed.
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