Recognizing Where You Hold Yourself Back as a writer

I’ve been working on a first draft of what I plan will become my third novel, while simultaneously working on some poetry for a future collection.

I usually write like this, bouncing between two different forms at the same time.

At the start of the year, I signed up for one of Erica Anzalone’s Witch Lit courses to help me generate some new ideas through the lens of witchcraft-related writings. It was a great experience that I got a lot out of.

One thing I didn’t expect to come up, however, was self-reflection upon my own processes.

Specifically the realization about how much I hold myself back in my long-form fiction.

When I write poetry or essays, I feel free. I go right into my truths, and my horrors. Sure, I play with language and experiment, especially as a poet. But I never feel confined by rules. I never think about “story arcs” or structure or conflict.

I don’t ask myself, “What’s motivating this character?” the way I do when I’m working on my novel.

My first novel, PostApoc, was a freeing creative experience. I took inspiration from William S. Burroughs and tried cut-up methods. I worked spells and poems into the greater narrative. I wrote certain scenes as though they were dreams, trying to replicate the unreliable narration we experience when asleep.

My second novel, The Mouth is a Coven, was less wild in its approach, though the language and tone still stayed poetic. But it’s still a more straightforward read, with a linear storyline and clearer structure.

Building a world around the long-form structure of beginning, middle and end is something I’m interested in doing as a writer. While I like my first two novels, I feel I’ve yet to hit my stride as a novelist. It’s a goal of mine to improve my craft in this area.

As I’m working on my current draft – a novel based on an apartment I lived in when I was in my mid-20s – I find myself circling around the same questions I’ve had before:

“Is this too weird?”
“Am I telling too much?”
“Is it okay to reveal this information to the reader?”

In my previous two novels, I was more concerned with the execution of language, and the experimentation within that. And I think that’s where experimental fiction can hide a lot: It’s not just about the story, but all of the components that create it.

Real life is strange on its own, and sometimes things happen in a certain way, and in a certain order, that can’t be explained. And yet as I attempt to write something based, in part, on some of my real-life experiences, I keep being haunted by the “rules” of writing.

I keep questioning whether I’m being clever enough, or whether I’m writing strong enough sentences. I keep wanting to dig into the emotional states of my narrator, but I wonder if I’m giving away too much by doing so.

I recognize that I need to simply give myself over to the work and let it come out as it wants to. I can edit it later, I know.

One thing that is helping is I’ve been writing this novel entirely by hand in spiral notebooks. I haven’t drafted a novel this way before and it’s preventing me from going back and editing prematurely.

Which is good, I think, given that I keep questioning what I’m putting down as I go.

But knowing now how to identify my hesitancy gives me power over those moments where I hold myself back.

At least I hope so.

What do you do when you feel like you’re holding back in your writing?