The Second Act Author is my video series dedicated to helping writers in their “second act” — fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years or older — bring their writing to fruition, to market, and to an audience. Watch the video or, if you prefer, read the article adapted from the video content.
You’re in your second act, later in life, maybe past 50, 60, 70… maybe past 80 years old, but you are finally doing it: You’re writing that story (or novel, memoir, or other creative writing endeavor) you’ve put off for years, decades, or maybe your whole life. But once you get a few hundred or a few thousand words in, the more you’re nagged by doubt.
The more you write, the more that doubt grows. You start to feel a little at sea. You start to wonder if you’re deluding yourself regarding the merits of your story; if, after everything, you’re wasting the little time you have left.
This is very common, and it’s something you can get past.
The Cause of Your Doubt
This is the story you’ve held in your head for so long; you know it so well. What could be the problem?
Well, that is the problem.
You’ve been carrying this story in your head maybe as long as you can remember. You’ve told it to yourself, imagined the characters and scenes and sequences, many times.
Over time, it can’t help but become idealized. It’s fully formed and perfect in your head.
That’s just how our brains work. Through the repetition of memory and our dedication to this product of our imagination, we end up with a kind of a platonic ideal of the story.
If there are gaps, our brains fill them in. If there are flaws, we just ignore them.
When we go to put that perfect vision on the page, there’s going to be a disconnect, because the words we see in black and white cannot match the perfection we’ve been carrying in our head. This to be expected with any idea you’ve been carrying that long.
Is Your Doubt in Your Fiction Justified?
So the question is: have you been fooling yourself, or are you simply stuck between that ideal and the reality of writing it down?
Is there a there there?
Just Keep Writing..?
You could just keep plowing through and maybe find out eventually if your story has merit, but what I’ve found? Unexamined doubt lingers, and worse, grows.
The more you struggle to write the manuscript, the actual tangible realization of the story, without some examination, you may even come to resent the work.
That is the last thing you want. This is your time, finally, to become an author. You don’t have time to waste going through maybe tens of thousands of words only to find out, yeah, no, this isn’t something.
We have to find out. You’ve got to examine it.
An Exercise to Gauge the Merit of Your Story
I would like you to do a little exercise.
I want you to put aside your manuscript.
Get a fresh pad of paper or fresh notebook, get a pen, put it in your hand, and yes, I would like you to do this by hand, so long as there aren’t physiological reasons you can’t. Do whatever you need to do, but there is a brain-body advantage to doing this by hand.
There’s a kind of a synergy as you move your arm and your hand and feel the words appear on the paper beneath your eyes. It allows you to go a little bit deeper. Filters are removed when you write by hand.
And for this exercise, it’s really important you get as close as possible to the material.
Step One: The Bright Thing
I want you to think about the one element that most often, most prominently, comes to mind when you think about your story.
Don’t think about what the story is about. Don’t think about the premise.
Just try to isolate that one big bright thing.
Maybe it’s a character whose face has lived in your mind’s eye all these years. Maybe it’s a picturesque setting; a castle on a hill, a lake house, a jungle. Maybe it’s some kind of crazy chase on unicycles down an alley.
You know what it is. You can see it, clear as day.
I want you to write about that.
This is important: remember this is not your manuscript. There’s no pressure to make it perfect, or “writerly,” or to concern yourself with craft at all.
This is just you, writing for you.
If it’s a character, I want you to describe them. Sometimes, I’ll have a free-form conversation between me, the author, and them. Try that, perhaps. Talk to them. Hear their voice, there on the page.
If it’s a sequence of events, write it out beat by beat. Imagine each part of that sequence. Put it on the page.
If it’s a particular setting or maybe even an object, describe it in as much detail as you can.
Take as long as you need; go for as many pages as is necessary.
Step Two: How Does it Make You Feel?
When you’re done: how did that make you feel? As the saying goes, did it light you up?
Write those thoughts out too, by hand, again, if you’re able.
Step Three: Compare and Assess
Now, compare the results of this exercise and how it made you feel with what you’ve written in your manuscript to date. When you do that, you’re going to learn something about the merit of the actual material.
You may discover whether or not your doubt is just that natural dissonance we feel when we encounter the gap between the perfect story in our head and the reality of actually writing it, or you may find out your doubt is valid.
The There is, Indeed, There
The most cut-and-dry result is, yeah, there it is. This isn’t about the material after all. That doubt was just the dissonance caused by the expectation that what you write will match that unrealistic, glossed over, heavily edited by your own subconscious version of the story.
You’re good to go. Get back at it.
Just don’t worry that what you’re writing doesn’t perfectly match what’s in your head. It’s okay. You’ve confirmed that this is something you can believe in.
Get the words down. Refining is for later, for the editing phase, after you’ve typed “the end.”
Adrift
Another possibility is the exercise lights you up, but your manuscript drifted from its center.
Sometimes the very act of writing can set us adrift; on a tangent. Sometimes that leads to a better path, sure, but sometimes… we just get a little lost.
That’s okay. Now you know. Re-center yourself.
Depending on how far you’ve gotten, maybe you want to start all over again with that manuscript. Or maybe it’s just a matter of going through it and cleaning things up so you’re back on track.
Be assured: the time spent on the manuscript so far was not wasted. This is one of the many ways the process can go.
The Story’s a Bit Thin
The next possibility is there’s plenty of fire in the free writing exercise, but one way or another, it doesn’t match the story that’s been in your head.
Perhaps you’re realizing the story is a little thin. You’ve come face to face with how our brains gloss over the imperfections and skip past the blanks.
At the risk of repetition: this is not cause for discouragement.
Far from it. This gives you the information to fill those blanks with substance. It’s a great opportunity to employ some story architecture work; to look at your manuscript and examine, beat by beat, the atomic elements of the story; to check the cause-and-effect chains.
That Candy from Childhood
This next result might be difficult to face, but again: it’s not a bad thing.
If your free writing exercise lights you up, but you don’t find that in the manuscript at all, it’s possible you’ve simply outgrown the original idea.
That thing that is so well known to you and so beloved in your head?
It’s just not relevant to you anymore. It’s not a story that, literally, you need to tell anymore.
But those years you’ve spent hanging on to the story in your head are not wasted. They got you to this point, where you’re ready and willing and able to write. And there may be elements you can salvage: characters, situations… but the thing that excited you in the exercise… that’s your new focus.
You’ll want to develop that.
I know it might sound a little discouraging, but really, it’s one of the best outcomes you can hope for, because you will have zeroed in on the thing that fascinates you. Now, with all your wisdom and experience (your second-act author superpower, as I talk about in another video) backing you up, you can move forward.
A Bonus Result
By the way, there’s one more potential result that’s honestly unlikely, but bears mentioning.
What if you think of your story and nothing springs to mind that shines brighter or speaks louder than anything else about the story?
Very likely, that’s telling you the same thing as the last result: You may be acting on an obligation to the ideal, but it’s something you’ve outgrown.
Doubt Comes with the Territory
It’s very safe to say that every author, every writer, whether they’ve written a hundred works or they’re on their very first: we all go through this to one degree or another every time we start a new thing, because whether you’ve carried the story for years or decades or just a few weeks, there will always be some degree of dissonance between the idealized version in your head and what you finally end up putting on the page.
This is not unique.
Onward!
I’m excited for you, because now, things are really going to get going.
If you’d like a little help figuring things out, some accountability staying on the path, a little one-on-one assistance… that’s what I do! If you have more resources than time and are committed to your practice as a second act author, set up a free discovery call with me. Let’s find out if we’re a good fit to work together, and how I might best help you.
Either way… don’t let those doubts go unanswered!
