Hey Reader,

I’ve gotta be honest with you:
I had a moment of exhaustion while working on my novel last week. A moment when I thought, can I do this, or should I throw in the towel?

I’d just mapped out everything I want to accomplish in my second round of revisions, and oh my stars, it’s a lot!

I’m not talking about tinkering with sentences here.
There’s some heavy lifting that needs to be done:

• New scenes to be written.
• Chapters to be entirely rewritten from a different character’s perspective.
• Antagonist motivation to be layered in.
• And the setting? Well, let’s just say it needs some oomph.

All said, about 2/3rds of the chapters need work. Ugh.
​At that moment it felt like there was no way I could possibly do all that work.

Luckily I had just written a blog post on how to keep going when you want to give up! You can read it here.​

One of the tips from the blog post is to stop and reflect on your story and notice how far you’ve come. So that’s what I did.

And as I reflected I thought back to a time when I only knew how the story started.
When I didn’t know what my characters were doing or why.
When I certainly didn’t have a rough draft written.

And now here I am with an entire manuscript, about to start a second round of revisions.

Wow. Reflecting on how far I’ve come helped put that big revision to-do list into perspective. Yes, those edits will be a lot of work. But I know I can do it because of everything I’ve done to get to this point.

If you’ve ever felt like throwing in the towel, this blog post is for you. Check it out here.​

Let's write,
Erin

erin@writewithnature.com
www.writewithnature.com