You’re going to encounter setbacks, and that’s okay. It’s normal for things to not go as planned in every aspect of life, but especially when it comes to storytelling. They come in all shapes and sizes, some bigger than others. And it’s going to be upsetting. That is absolutely part of the process and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I’ve talked before about coping skills, and those will be your friends while you sort out your emotions. But what kinds of setbacks do you commonly see? Let’s go over those first.
I think the biggest, and most devastating one, is losing your work. Out of all the ones I’ve had to navigate losing my work was probably the hardest, and the one that almost made me give up. When I started this journey more than 15 years ago it took me ages to get to the point where I started to put my thoughts down in word documents. A good friend of mine was amazing and let me bounce ideas off of her as they developed, but that wouldn’t work forever. Eventually, I had to put things down. That was a completely different task that I had repeatedly failed in the past, but I knuckled down and started. Character profiles, worldbuilding, a cluster of loosely organized ideas grew on my hard drive, but it took me a long time to get to where I had to force myself to start telling the story.
I lost the first chapter. Word glitched and it didn’t save correctly. I was able to salvage some of it, but I was devastated. I cried and walked away because I was ready to give up. And my friend held my hand through it, and was able to encourage me to get back to telling the story after months of wondering if I wanted to try again. And eventually, I finished it. It took eight years and I need to completely rewrite the entire thing, but I did it. If I had better coping skills back then, it might not have taken so long to navigate the very big feelings losing that much of my work so early, but I still persevered. I know, because on my fifth novel I also lost work. I lost the last chapter. It was upsetting, of course, but I salvaged what I could, rewrote what I could, and then engaged in self-care and used those coping skills I’ve built over the last decade-plus to get me back into the swing of things.
Setbacks aren’t always lost work though. Sometimes setbacks are realizing you need to fix a massive plot hole, or you need another round of revisions to get your manuscript up to snuff. I’m there right now myself. I was doing what I thought was one last pass of edits, using the immersive reader function in Word, and I found not just a minor plot hole (easily fixed) but I finally identified my most common crutch words. It was hard to come to terms with, to know I have to go back through at least one more time to fix both issues, but being in a better place mentally means that the downtime I needed to accept that wasn’t the months it took when I encountered my first big problem.
Another setback I’ve encountered is realizing I needed a dual POV (point of view) for two different series. My second and fourth books I set out with a single POV, and while they worked out okay a good chunk of the story was missing in both series, and I realized that I needed someone else to tell the parts of the story the main character wasn’t privy to. In that case, I debated whether I would add an additional POV or release companion novels and keep all the works much shorter, but I decided to tell the stories side by side. That did take a while to sort out, but it was because both options had a lot to consider, and I wanted to make sure I made the right choice for me.
Sometimes, though, the problem is a character doesn’t work as written. Depending on how far in you are, this can be minor, or major, or somewhere in between. I’ve changed characters before I sat down to write a story, partway through, and even toward the end because I realized something about them didn’t work. I’m sure if I was a better plotter it would be less of a hassle, but I use a hybrid method to get my work done. As a result, my rough drafts are more like an extended outline, one that I expand as I get into the revision process. Due to the fluid nature of my process there is a lot that can change by the end, and characters have been one of those.
There are also plot-related setbacks too. I’ve realized that twists didn’t work, or come up with a better one when I was knee-deep in prose. I’ve cut entire subplots from first (or later) drafts to use elsewhere. I’ve realized too that I needed more content and had to reverse engineer a way to work them in. It’s taken some finely-tuned creativity to navigate those hurdles, and quite a few coping skills.
There are more here that I haven’t listed, either because I haven’t encountered them or they were much more minor compared to some of the others. But they all took a certain degree of emotional intelligence to navigate. Writing is hard work, and knowing that you need to go back and fix something can be a daunting task. That’s why I talk about coping skills so much. They’ve helped me weather difficulties in a much healthier light these days, because I know it’s not the end of the world. and if I have to, I know I can shelve it and come back when I feel better. I do that all the time for a variety of reasons, and it helps because I know it will be there when I’m ready. If writing upsets you, take a step back and do something to help yourself feel better. Coping skills come in all shapes and sizes, and it will take time and effort to make them work, but they will be worth it. You just have to put the legwork in to get there.