I’m a little depressed today. I’ve a cold coming on, a really bad headache and it the whole ‘not working well’ attitude seems to have crept into my writing as well.

My NaNoWriMo novel from last year, which has been progressing so well, is close to completion. I have two scenes to go. The final wind-down scene, plus one other scene that I left out of the original story because trying to write it had stopped me for two weeks. I finally added a note to say do that scene later, outlined what was to happen, and moved on. I haven’t stopped writing since.

So the story is nearly finished. When I’m done it will be 85,000 words, and it’s nice to know that the first draft is done. Six months to write a novel. I worked pretty hard on the novel for all that time, too.

Then I look back and remember that I wrote 50,000 of those words in the first month.

I can’t do a 50,000 word novel every month. I’d be surprised if anyone working full-time can. Not if they want some modicum of life, that is. Right now I can’t even manage 10,000 words, and that’s only one draft. Over the last six months I haven’t taken time to revise any earlier novels. There are two of them sitting waiting for second or third draft revisions. And as for Barrain, I haven’t touched it for even longer.

I should be over the moon. I finished a novel.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back the euphoria.

I have just finished critiquing a fellow writer’s novel. It was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it a lot. But, it was a critique and so I after I commented on the good things, I concentrated on what didn’t work. The main problems with the story were easy to pick. Too much information was conveyed through dialogue. The book changed part-way through, as if the author had finally realised where it was going, but he hadn’t gone back and changed the start. There were some excellent emotional scenes but in other parts of the story there was no emotion at all, and it was just a straight telling of this happened, then that happened and then that.

These are all traits I recognise from my own writing.

If it’s so easy to recognise them in someone else’s story, why can’t I recognise them in my own?

Most authors will agree that time gives distance to their work. Putting a manuscript away for six months definitely shows up many flaws. Yet even so you don’t get them all. You make the novel as good as it can be, but when you get your first beta reader they still pick up a whole lot of things that you hadn’t even noticed, even if it has been months between drafts.

I do a lot of writing with a writing partner. We both work the same way. We talk about what we wish to write and what’s going to happen in the story, but only one person sits down and hammers out the first draft. After that the other writer goes through the text and finds the holes and adds all the things the initial writer left out.

It used to be that this worked brilliantly. The writer who reviewed the first draft gave the same sort of feedback that a writer from a (good) critique group did.

But, I have noticed that as we write more and more together we’re actually becoming blind to each other’s writing mistakes. We know the other person’s writing so well now that it’s getting harder and harder to pick up those mistakes first time around, or even second time around.

We’re relying more and more on other beta readers to pick them up.