There are many blog posts, tweets, memes etc out there telling you to get writing. Far fewer will tell you to stop. What can I say, I’m a rebel.

The other day I saw a couple of tweets from the marvellous EE Ottoman (whose delightful post-WW2 cottagecore historical romance The Companion you should read now, or at least once you’ve finished this post). EE said:

I meant to start working on a new project a few weeks ago but I just didn’t … and I felt really bad about that until yesterday morning when I realized I’d been thinking about the book from the wrong POV this entire time.

and if I had started when I’d meant to I probably would have ended up writing words I probably would have ended up scrapping anyway.

This really struck a chord with me. I have a delightful Protestant work ethic/Catholic guilt combo so I basically feel terrible about myself whenever I’m not actively writing. But hurling yourself into a book before you’re ready can be at best a waste of time, probably disheartening, and sometimes a project killer. I have an elephant’s graveyard of partials that foundered because I started writing them without XXX.

You: Sorry? What do you mean, XXX?

Me: Yes, well, that’s the tricky bit.

XXX is whatever the hell you need to get going on the book. It might be obvious and fixable. (You haven’t done enough research. You don’t actually have any idea what’s going to happen after the first meeting. You’ve created a situation where it’s impossible for them to be together, but you haven’t thought of the brilliant solution.)

Or it may be less obvious, more complicated. (You’ve got a great secondary plot worked out, but the main storyline is perhaps underpowered. Maybe you’re wrong about which one ought to be the main storyline? Maybe you thought it was one genre but it’s another. You want the plot to go this way but something is tugging it that way.)

Or it may even be that evil thing, the unknown unknown. The thing you can’t pin down or, even worse, aren’t aware of. When it just isn’t quite…you know, there, and you don’t know why. When you have no idea where to go next and the blank page is an unsubtle metaphor for your brain.

I just finished book 1 of my Doomsday Books (working title) duo. I had a couple of things in book 2 I absolutely needed to sort out before I started, primarily a plot issue that needed pinning down because it might require tweaking #1. I worked them out triumphantly in my head, which meant I had it nailed and could get going, right?

Ha. I wrote 5000 words of #2, and now I’m right here writing a blog post about not writing a book too soon because guess what: I wasn’t ready.

The warning signs I’ve picked up and, for once, paid attention to:

• I wrote the opening chapter and it was just scene setting. I thought, fine, I’ll jump to the interesting bit and go back later. WARNING KLAXON: if you the author aren’t interested, I assure you no reader will be. This might be an easy fix, just me starting in the wrong place, or it might signal that my entire set-up is boring and I don’t want to write it. I’d better work on that one.
• Point of view. (Looking at EE’s tweet, I swear this might be the greatest unacknowledged stumbling block for writers.) I assumed it was going to be dual third person like book 1, but now it’s pulling to single person, only I’m not entirely happy about that because it feels like a cop-out. I need to work through what that’s going to do to my narrative either way before I make my mind up.  
• I literally only just finished the last book. Maybe I need a bit more time for the well to refill. (No, really, KJ? /rolleyes/)

I don’t have any major doubts about this book. I wrote the MCs’ first meeting yesterday and it went great. But there’s something not-ready-to-go here, and I’d be a fool to force the words down when I know it’s not working.

[dramatic music] Or would I?

I was definitely not ready to write Subtle Blood, the final part of the Will Darling Adventures. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t felt morally obliged to (it’s book three of a same-couple series with no HEA till the end so I would have been abandoning my readers). It took me ten agonising months to bang the bastard out. I wrote an entire blog post on how I managed to wrench the damn thing out of my head and onto the page, if you want the gory details. And, not to brag, but it’s got a 4.52 on Goodreads over more than 2100 ratings and some stunning reviews. It honestly came out good.

So does that mean I should just push on through with Doomsday #2?

I don’t think so. First, I never again want to write a book like I wrote Subtle Blood because wow, that experience sucked. I think I could do it only because I’d already written two books about Will and Kim, so I had a massive head start on the world and their relationship and loads of material to work with. Second, forcing it ends up, as EE’s tweets suggest, with huge word wastage. (I binned in the region of 50K on Subtle Blood false starts. That’s a short novel.) Third and most important, as I have discovered on several projects, if you spend too much time writing fragments that turn into dead ends, you won’t just run out of spoons for the idea, you’ll also exhaust the knives, forks, and weird twiddly thing in the miscellaneous section that might be a fish scaler.

I’ve killed too many ideas by trying to force them. I’m not killing this one.

So when should you be writing, and when deliberately Not Writing? This is a hard one to judge because the default state of being a writer is not wanting to write and doing almost anything to avoid it, hence why we’re always on Twitter. 90% of the time, “bum in chair [or feet on treadmill], hands on keyboard” is the best writing advice.

But sometimes the bit of your brain telling you nope, nope, no writey is correct. Sometimes you need to give yourself space not to write because you’re doing that even more valuable and useful thing, thinking.

To quote EE again:

learning when a book is ready to be written is so tough. Particularly for me because it’s more about a feeling and not a certain number of hours spent researching, notes taken, etc.

My best advice is, when you find you’re not writing, find out why. Ask yourself why you’re reluctant, why it doesn’t feel right. Find the XXX. Pin down the problem, think round the options, step away from the keyboard while your mind works, and you might save yourself a lot of blood, toil, tears, sweat, and typing.