So this week, I completed writing one of my novel projects! 116,235 word written over quite a few months finally led to the book being written in a way that satisfied my vision for it. 

But… now what do I do?

I asked myself this question both after finishing this and my other novel project, an 85,000 word project. Obviously, my first thought was to immediately start revising and editing the book. I mean, of course that would be the right course of action! Every time I wrote essays for school, I immediately went back and revised it before quickly submitting it!

Well, two things on why this process inevitably failed. One, the essays were around 1500 words. Revising a 1500 word essay and 85,000 word book are VERY different!

And number two. I was a terrible procrastinator when I was in school, so I didn’t really have a choice (come to think of it, my papers would have probably done better if I would have had more time to edit… whoops!).

So, immediately after finishing the first novel. I sat down and started to edit, or at least tried to start editing. My brain absolutely refused to even start revising the novel. After an hour of staring at my screen, I had done absolutely no work on the draft. I figured I was just hungry, so I ate lunch and returned to my computer. Still, nothing was done.

I spent all day looking at the first page of my draft, and didn’t touch a single thing. Not good.

So, I kinda sat back and reflected what was going on. I usually didn’t have any issues sitting down and writing out multiple chapters at a time. It seemed like my brain just refused to do anything now. Did I lose my motivation to write? Well, no. I still was writing poems and other smaller blog posts at the time. So, what was going on?

That’s when it dawned on me: It wasn’t that my brain wasn’t working. My brain was just working in the wrong mode. 

Let me explain… My brain was essentially in “Creation mode”, not “Polish mode”. I was still able to write fresh projects, I just couldn’t polish the larger projects. Also, I was fresh off of writing the project, so my brain was still focused on the story rather than the details of the project. So how do I shut off my creative brain on the project? Well, easy! I just had to take a break from the project. Well that opened up another problem…

If I was taking a break… what do I do in the meantime? Well, the first few days were just decompressing. I played some games, spent extra time with the family, and thought. Eventually, I started to have an idea for another book. An entirely different book. Over the next week, a simple plan morphed into a giant project that I began writing (this was indeed my second novel draft).

Eventually, I went back to my first project. Of course, revising was a lot easier! Suddenly, my brain could find the problems I had in the novel, and I could fix them with relative ease. Eventually, I finished the editing process and built out some other documents for the novel’s future (ill go over the fun of this process later, because MAN was that an experience).

Now that I’ve finished my second novel, I’m doing the same process. I’m forcing myself to take a break and working on a different project. I even started writing a sequel novel to the recently finished project, though ill be pausing on that after a few chapters (just because I want a fully fresh mind when coming back for revisions). 

Overall, I found just taking your mind off the project for a while can really help make the revisions easier to approach. I’d absolutely recommend trying this, but I also know that our minds work differently. Some people work better when the project is completely fresh in their minds, while other people NEED that distance.

Now I’m curious. If you have finished a novel project, what does your process look like? I would love to hear from you about some of the projects you completed, and how your process worked.