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Hello friends! As the title suggests, I’ve kinda hit a rough spot with my writing.

Not in the way you’d probably think, it’s not the dreaded writer’s block. Rather the opposite, I’m in that blissful state every writer longs for where word counts are being hit, the words are flowing, the story is taking shape, and writing is fun.

However, in the past few months, I’ve noticed that my writing has kind of stagnated. Or, it feels like it has.

So, my first question is, how do you know when your writing skills are plateauing?

I’ve often seen with published authors when they’ve published a few books, they start to fall into a pattern. Their writing starts going down in quality and starts getting somewhat repetitive. I don’t think this is something they’re usually aware of.

I’ve always been scared about the same thing happening to me without noticing it. Like, on the growth curve, I feel like I’ve gotten past the beginner stage. I even feel like I know what I’m doing most of the time, and I think that’s part of the problem. I don’t know what I don’t know anymore. I feel like I can’t find new stuff to learn, and I don’t mean that in a ‘I know everything’ way, more ‘I don’t know where to find new ways to improve because I’ve learned everything I can find to the best of my ability’.

I think some contributing factors are that I’m currently rewriting, for the second time. So, I’m in the polishing stages, where I’m already very familiar with the story and it’s no longer rough or unformed. I’ve also been working on this story for a long time, but I don’t want to abandon it, even though my growth has been stuck. I want to finish it, I really love it and I’m motivated to finish even though I don’t want to publish it. I also just want it to be done so I can move on with other things, and I don’t want to jump around and not finish it.

So, I’ve been doing the same thing for a while, out of pure necessity of working on a long trilogy that takes a lot of time.

I’m getting critique on it as well, but a lot of it feels like minor polishing things, so not any big writing things that I have to learn about and improve on. The story is just genuinely pretty good and pretty polished. I feel like there’s so many things I don’t know, but I don’t know where to find them.

I’d be really interested in hearing if any of you have experienced anything similar, and if anyone has any ideas for growing through it! Or, if it’s just a part of the editing process where the story is pretty polished and you just have to push through it and enjoy the peace while it lasts? XD

 

Some tags:

@noah-cochran

@calidris

@this-is-not-an-alien

@merieshenanigans

@obrian-of-the-surface-world

@joelle-stone

@mamaauthoress

 

@anyone! I’d really appreciate the feedback!