Hi Tina! 

I’m in the process of writing a novel, and each day I struggle with moving forward versus reading what I’ve already written. On the one hand, I like to review my writing from the previous day to get back into the world of the story. On the other hand, reading what I’ve written inevitably leads to tweaking, changing, or editing. This morning, I spent so much time tweaking that I didn’t get any new words down!

Do you have any advice to help find the balance?

Thank you,

Stuck in reverse

Dear Stuck in Reverse,

I am officially diagnosing you with terminal Writer’s Cha-Cha; the two steps forward, two steps back cycle of write-revise-write-revise. I suspect we could fill an entire ballroom with writers who share the same affliction, myself included! I’ve also heard it called the “editing loop,” but cha-cha-ing is more fun than looping, right?

I want to tell you to please stop doing it, to just start writing every day, that you will never finish your book if you keep going back to yesterday’s words. But it turns out that advice is not only rigid, it’s no longer popular. Like many rules, it seems to have gone by the wayside. I say, good riddance. 

In fact, when I searched for some tricks to get you unstuck from the Cha-Cha, I was only met with overwhelming evidence that your approach is commonplace among prolific writers and may even help cure writer’s block. Somewhere in my teacher-brain, I can’t help but think this idea of revisiting yesterday’s work aligns with basic learning theory — we construct meaning like building blocks by recalling and reflecting on prior knowledge in order to tackle something new.

Or maybe you just need to add a twirl to the end of your cha-cha. In Still Writing, for example, Dani Shapiro reveals the rhythm she’s followed for years: “three pages a day, five days a week.” But does she reread those three pages before she begins the next day, you ask? Oh yes. In fact a lot happens to those three pages before they get reread the next day. 

“…I revisit them in the afternoon. I scribble in the margins….Sometimes I reread them before I go to sleep. I cross out paragraphs, I rearrange sentences. I ask questions that I hope to answer in the light of the next day. These pages are where I begin the following morning, because those notes give me a way in. If I begin by implementing the changes, before I know it I’m back inside the manuscript…” (p. 100)

Maybe it’s all about rhythm, then. Even the cha-cha can take you around the room once you get the hang of it. I propose it’s okay to reread and tweak yesterday’s words if you can still stick to your original commitment to write, whether it’s 500 words a day or three pages a day. Perhaps it’s the follow through that is tripping you up, because the rereading and revising process eats away at your allotted writing time. 

What if you put a time limit on the rereading part — maybe ten to fifteen minutes? — then get busy with new stuff. I have a feeling that if you tried to keep yourself from rereading, you might just end up staring at the screen or empty notebook in frustration. It would be like expecting yourself to function without coffee and Wordle in the morning. Insanity!

It also might be the structure of a novel that is exacerbating the issue. A novel requires a story arc whereas creative nonfiction can be a bit more loose and forgiving in its flow. In memoir, you know what happened; in a novel, you are making it up as you go along. 

Rereading each day may help you pick up the story where you left off, so there is consistency in the details. 

Author Natalie Goldberg would likely agree. In Writing Down the Bones, she explains the difference between writing a memoir and writing a novel. A novel doesn’t “work the way the mind works,” she insists. In a novel, “we have this tremendous need to tell a story, create meaning. So there has to be a structure, a beginning, a middle and an end.” In memoir, she tells us, the fact that we wore a brown hat might have no meaning, but in a novel, “I had to have something in chapter 3, like a brown hat, have meaning in chapter 33” (p. 187). Goldberg doesn’t say if this consistency involved a lot of daily rereading, but I’m taking a wild guess that it did.

And finally, Stuck in Reverse, you might be a bit hard on yourself. One seemingly less productive day here or there over the course of a writing life does not spell disaster. It is a marathon, as they say, not a sprint. Even Shapiro admits, “having a rhythm is no magic pill.” You are human. Life happens. However, I’d wager there are likely more days than not in which you reread-revise and then get on with producing new writing. Someday, when you are a famous writer, and you write a book on the craft of writing, you may even find yourself promoting the Cha-Cha method as the secret to your success. 

Either way, keep rereading and keep dancing!

Do you have a writing-related dilemma? Send your questions to asktina@projectwritenow.org. Selected questions will be featured in upcoming columns, and Tina will ensure her answers offer valuable insights for writers facing similar challenges.