by Erica Vetsch, @EricaVetsch

Have you been there? Have you gotten to a point in your novel where you are sure the entire thing is dreck, you couldn’t write your way out of a wet paper bag, and there is no way to edit, polish, or otherwise manipulate this hot mess into a good story?

Despair, misery, discouragement. Made all the worse because you know you are the only writer who encounters this phenomenon?

Let me tell you the words you need to hear: You. Are. Not. Alone.

In a recent (and very unscientific) social media poll, NINE out of ten authors surveyed said they experience this very issue with their stories.

With every single manuscript I’ve written, at somewhere around the two-thirds to three-quarter mark in the story, I hate it. The characters, the plot, the setting, the theme…all of it seems beyond redemption.

I used to become bewildered. After all, this idea was so shiny and perfect when I started out. I was enthusiastic, engaged, and eager. But now that I’m more than forty manuscripts into this writing career, I’ve come up with a process for dealing with “Manuscript Hatred.”

1. Brace yourself. You know it will happen. Arm yourself mentally and emotionally for the event. It’s important not to go into paralytic shock. Instead, prepare to battle through it.
2. Keep perspective. When it comes to our brain-children-book-babies, we can become a bit…skewed in our emotions. No, your manuscript is not as shiny and beautiful as you envisioned it would be at this point when you started, but it REALLY isn’t as bad as you think it is. Don’t be a drama queen/king.
3. Step back. You need a bit of time away in order to be able to evaluate your story objectively. Give yourself some time to rest and think of other things for awhile before trying figure out what “went wrong.” (Chances are, nothing went wrong, the story is quite fixable, and we’ve succumbed to one reason or another for hating our work at the moment.)
4. Recognize why. The reasons why we run smack into manuscript-hatred differ from author to author, but there are some generalities common to most writers.
   1. Writer’s Doubt. We let doubt creep into our minds, listening to those voices that say we’re not good enough, the story stinks, our characters are blah.  We even marinate our brains in this miasma of bad self-speak. Is it any wonder that we hate our work when this is how we talk to ourselves?
   2. Scope and Sequence. Writing a novel is a complex undertaking. It may take you six months, a year, or longer to write a complete novel. Over that time, you may not think what you’ve done four months ago is any good, or it doesn’t seem to fit what you’re writing now. You’ve changed, your characters have changed, do you even recognize these people? Or you might not remember the nuances of something you wrote so carefully so many months ago. All the story items might be there, you just don’t remember because it’s taken you awhile to get to this point in the story.
   3. Learning Curve. You may have taken a class, read a how-to book, listened to a pod-cast, attended a conference, and now you know things about writing that you didn’t know before. You recognize something in your work that needs to change, and now, faced with your new knowledge, you’re daunted by the idea of going back and removing head-hopping or showing where you’ve been telling or cutting out all the places where you explained to the reader through dialogue something that should’ve been in the narrative.
   4. It’s Hard. You’ve gotten to either a part of the story that is difficult to write, or you’ve gotten to the part of the story where your character has to go through something hard. We want to blame our writing and the story, when in reality, it’s just the point in the story where things aren’t going well for our characters, and we don’t want to put them through anything else that’s hard.
   5. What Now? You’ve written yourself into a corner, or you’ve veered from your carefully-constructed synopsis and you don’t know what should happen next.
5. Dig In! Once you’ve given yourself a breather, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do the work that will make you fall in love with your manuscript again.
   1. Read it. Read it from the beginning, not doing massive edits, but rather getting a feel for the story again. Keep a notebook, or use track changes, and mark the places you want to work on, but don’t stop to fix anything just yet. You’re looking for the overall story-thread here, and you don’t want to clutter your mind with details at this point. Sometimes this step alone is enough to remind you why you love the story.
   2. Fix stuff. Often as we write, we make changes as the story goes along that will affect earlier chapters, and by the two-thirds to three-fourths mark, we’ve changed so much that we can’t write the end of the story until we go back and fix all the things I’ve changed. Now’s the time!
   3. Re-read. Once you’ve made the changes you KNOW you need to make, read it again. For continuity, for characterization, for content. (This also helps tremendously as you do the final polishing, because you will have already edited the bulk of the manuscript.) Does the story hold up? Does it hold your interest? Does it point to a logical (not necessarily predictable) climax and ending?
6. Evaluate Emotions. Have you been able to reconnect to the story, change what needs to be changed, and motivate yourself to finish? Have you squashed writer doubt, answered story questions, re-familiarized yourself with the story, and applied any new techniques you’ve learned? Then press on to step 7.
7. Resist Temptation. There is always a huge temptation to set a story aside when it gets difficult and move on to another, shinier, more intriguing idea. Resist! It is too easy to allow ourselves to be distracted by a pretty new idea that we somehow believe will be easier to write. Guess what? You will reach the same point in that new manuscript as you did with the current one…the part where you think it’s all dreck, that you can’t write your way out of a wet paper bag, and there is no way to edit, polish, or otherwise manipulate this hot mess of words into a story. If you continually jump into a new project when the going gets tough, you’ll never finish a story, you’ll never be in a position to send your novel out into the world for anyone else to read. Don’t be a serial starter just because writing gets hard.

One of the most comforting things about the whole “Hate My Manuscript “ thing is that it is not a unique-to-you event. Other writers experience it, too. The next most comforting thing is that it’s fixable. Re-read, edit, and remember why you loved the story in the first place. Finish that story and receive the reward of doing something complex, difficult, and satisfying…even if, at one point, you thought you hated it all and were ready to chuck it into the bin.

Mail Order Mishaps

Dreams of Finding Mr. Right Go Wrong in the Old West — The Galway Girl by Erica Vetsch Kansas, 1875 A mail-order mix-up sends Irish lass Maeve O’Reilly to the Swedish community of Lindsborg, Kansas. Will Kaspar Sandberg consider it a happy accident or a disaster to be rectified as soon as possible?

ERICA VETSCH can’t get enough of history, whether it’s reading, writing, or visiting historical sites. She’s currently writing another historical romance and plotting which history museum to conquer next! You can find her online at www.ericavetsch.com and on her Facebook Page where she spends WAY TOO MUCH TIME! www.facebook.com/EricaVetschAuthor/