I promise I don’t mean this as a brag—that’s not my intention. It’s a simple symptom, byproduct, a side effect of something that a lot of writers strive to do—and, if you embark on your writing journey a certain way, you’re going to hit this too, and you should be aware of the potentiality of it.
And it’s, hilariously, having written too much. Too many words. Editing, posting, sharing your creations, if ignored and the single-minded goal of making word counts go higher and higher becomes too focused, then you will eventually hit the point that I did, where you feel buried by the unfinished, the unreleased creations.
My unpublished books, still in their infancy of first drafts, cry out loudly. Agonizing and wondering why they are malformed and too wordy.
At a certain point, I literally had to stop the book I was working on because the weight of the other stories that I needed to edit was weighing on me. The Dailies needed changing, my way of being a writer needed changing—and I am still working out how to edit at even close to the speed I was writing tales and stories.
The balancing act of life as a writer is also balancing writing with editing.
Again, not a brag. A warning. If you embark on one of those “write several thousand words a day” quests, or even just a regular daily writing pace, and you don’t bother to go and occasionally clean up the word vomit, you can find yourself like me—with so many characters and worlds festering in your head that it’s difficult to bring any more into the universe without feeling guilty.
I know for some, this seems like a very petty thing to have a problem with, or something that seems too much of a good thing and not possibly an issue—but just imagine living in a house full of unfinished puzzles. Just corners and centers left unfulfilled. Your entire living room covered with them. Would that not be distracting and infuriating?
Because sometimes that’s how my hard drive on my writing computer feels like.
Sometimes that’s what my head feels like.
I owe it to those people and monsters and creatures and worlds and dimensions and deities and concepts and ideas and themes that I made to give them what attention I can.
As pretentious as it sounds, overwriting can lead to its own problems. Being prolific does not suddenly make things easier.
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Special thanks to: Bob Gerkin, Collin Pearman, Dylan Alexander, Jerry Banfield, and Michael The Comic Nerd.
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