Trust the Process

Hi everyone,

Okay, okay. I’ve lost all perspective on my micro-tension draft. 37 pages with no micro-tension gaps. I wish I were that good but there’s no way my rate went from 25% of my daily pages to 5% over two days. Yesterday was 10%, today was 0%!!

That’s suuuper hinky.

I’m absolutely determined to master micro-tension—I will not be bested by it—so I re-read the relevant chapter in Donald Maass’s book*. And took a new set of notes.

And in the 7 pages I read after I finished his chapter, I found 5 pages lacking micro-tension. They weren’t zero tension pages but they were 70% no micro-tension pages.

Okay, so here’s what I think was happening.

1.     I was deleting words at the same time as adding micro-tension—I deleted 70 words today. I’m pretty sure this distracted me and took over my main focus.

2.     I want to be done so I think I was going too fast. At the start of this draft, I was spending much more time per page contemplating the micro-tension on the page.

3.     I’m super stressed about all the words I’m adding and I think it made me more lenient on my pages, resulting in me adding less micro-tension. Every micro-tension I add, I have to find words to delete. Which will probably mean another line edit draft when I’m finished this draft where I only delete words because I’m not cutting enough words right now for all the micro-tension I’m adding in.

Here’s how I’m going to change what I’m doing to address this:

1.     I’m going to go slower. Back to reading ten pages a day instead of 30.

2.     I’ll read the ten pages once for micro-tension and then I’ll go back to page one and cut words. So two read throughs.

3.     Also I’m going to highlight all the emotion and the micro-tension on the page before taking notes. Then I’m going to list all the emotions my main character could be feeling and why. Only then will I make the conclusion as to whether I need to add micro-tension to the page.

4.     I’m going to try to ignore how many words I’m adding and reconcile myself to the fact that I’ll have to read the entire manuscript again searching for even more words to delete. Sigh. I have to have trust that I’ll find the words to delete. In my six line edit drafts-just to delete words-not story, I deleted 28K words. So far on this draft, I’ve deleted 1,155 words and I’m just past half way, so I’ll end up deleting 2K words. If I have 100 micro-tension pages, at 30 words per page, then I’ll be adding 3K words. At least. So I’ll have to find one thousand plus extra words. Probably more. I have to have blind faith that I’ll find the words. And not stress about it.

Tomorrow, I’m going to go back to the 37 pages I might have misjudged. It will take me at least 3 days to redo this, if I keep to my 10 pages a day method.

I reserve the right to increase to 15 pages if I get back on track after a week.

Lessons learned: go slower, be more detailed, take more time. Don’t do two tasks simultaneously. Be patient.

Okay. That’s all from me.

Chat tomorrow.

Happy writing,

Joanne.