Maybe You're Overthinking It

Am I returning to the writer's notebook?

Earlier this year, I started paying a lot of attention to my craft, to the general craft of writing. I studied story structure and the hero’s journey. I tried to read Bird by Bird and did finish Mastering Creative Anxiety and plotted out the movies I watched/books I read to see the skeleton of their stories.

Not that I had never done this before. Obviously, I had to do this for a grade when I was in school, but I also had taken deliberate moments to revisit how stories are written since then. Moments like when I read On Writing and Die Empty.

But this year, more than ever before, I was conscious about putting this education into practice. Instead of passively accepting the experience and wisdom of the masters, I was trying to apply it to my own work. I plotted out a novel for the first time ever and consciously thought, “Is this the inciting incident, is it in the right spot, does that spot come x% of the way through the book?”