Itchy Bitesized 44: Twelve Things About Pausing A Project
How to cope with, and even make the most of, some months or years away from writing your novel or memoir
One of the great writing joys is being sunk deep in a draft, or blasting forward with it (your metaphor may vary): the work seems to have its own momentum, its own confidence. There’s a sense of overall rightness about what arrives on the page, however much tweaking you know it will need. The hoped-for writing day which evaporates in coping with a poorly parent or child, or an emergency plumber, is frustrating but not derailing.
But when you have to press the pause button for many weeks, months or years it’s another matter. Whether a previous project has come back to roost, there are research reasons why this one must wait, or non-writing work, family or health stuff requires all your attention and energy, it can be hard to keep the faith in this project and your ability to make it work.
If you have to set a project aside it can be difficult to trust that you will recover that momentum and confidence, be able to pick it up where you left off, and regain your writing mojo. I think there are two aspects to coping and even benefitting from an enforced pause: mindset, and practicalities.
Mindset:
There are genuine writing benefits to taking a pause, so understanding those can help you to keep your morale up in the gap.
Every project is the product of the particular circumstances of its writing. If you had begun it on a different day, or with a different set of research materials, or happening to have recently read some different books, your finished book would have come out differently. A pause is really just one more circumstance.
Every project starts in your head as a sparkly cloud of ideas and endless promise, but condensing that cloud into specific words on your pages means that all the other ways it might have been never will be. Feeling those losses is natural, but you can’t know how or why the pause was responsible for what you’ve lost, so fretting about it does no good.
If you’ve learnt to write even when you don’t feel like it, when circumstances are unpropitious, or when a project gets stuck, then you may feel you ‘shouldn’t’ pause properly, but ‘ought’ to grab the few scraps of time you can, and keep writing. But if the scraps are few and far apart, you’ll just end up fiddling and losing confidence, without making any real progress. Whatever your must-write demon says, it’s wiser to accept the need to put the actual writing away completely.
When you lose touch with the substance and detail of the writing because you’re away from it, you tend to remember it simplified, and it’s easy to get anxious about it being clichéd or too like everyone else’s (as many writers do when boiling the story down to a synopsis). This is natural, so postpone making decisions about its fate until you’re back to experiencing it fully in the round.
When you are able to go back to it, it’s bound to take a bit of warming-up. The fact that the first few sessions feel like wading through treacle is par for the course. Don’t despair, just keep going.
Practicalities
Before you put the work-in-progress away, have a think about what useful engagements with the project might be possible, if the time or chance is offered: going to a place, reading a particular book or visiting an archive, talking to someone, drawing, painting or a small developmental things?
Don’t think in terms of a formal To Do list, but more about making sure that if some time suddenly appears, you’re reading to make the most it. It can also keep the project alive and ticking over gently in your head, in an unpressured way.
The benefits of a writing pause can include some of the following. Are there things you could do that would help make the most of the pause?
ideas, characters and settings get to mulch down, to change and develop, rather than immediately being pressed into service in a draft.
other writing projects can ask things of you that this one didn’t - but you learn from that work, and can bring that understanding to this one when you do restart it.
other people’s writing in other genres - or poetry, theatre, visual art, music, non-fiction and documentaries on apparently unrelated topics - can enrich or challenge what you thought you were doing with this one.
writers go to a lot of trouble to get distance from their work, and a pause is a heaven-sent opportunity to do exactly that.
Make sure you have a dedicated notebook in which to record things which rise up (mixed metaphor alert!) from that ticking-along-in-the-background stage, as they occur to you. Don’t try yet - while you’re away from the work iteslf - to sort, censor or judge. Wait till you’re fully back in touch with it and then sift out what’s useful.
For all the reasons in that Don’t Fiddle post, resist the temptation to keep checking in with the project when you know you can do any reasonably sustained work.
When you do come back to it, make the most of the enforced distance. Even if you left it in a very dishevelled state, resist picking up the drafting where you left off, or diving in and starting to fix the first thing that you spot. Instead, print it out and read what you’ve got ‘like a reader’, and make tons of notes as you go recording your reactions and thoughts about it, without (yet) sorting, censoring or judging. From there, work out what your first work should be. If it’s a very chaotic set of drafts and you can’t even remember where you got to, try taming your draft.
As so often, this was exactly what I needed just now! I’m about to dive back into a paused project (left aside unfinished for a year while I worked on two more pressing ones). I’ve sent it to my kindle and read it “ as a reader” and have realised the “missing link” I always suspected was weakening one timeline. I’m deliberately not letting myself get back to it until I’ve sorted out a few other things but I’m feeling energised and excited rather than worried and despondent. Without the pause I’d never have had that insight because the insight is in response to something in the world that came to the fore during the pause. So yay for pausing and thank you for such a useful and timely post. As ever!
Brilliant post, thank you xxx💜