It’s hard for me to imagine I was the first kind of writer. Years ago I started a lot of novels, as I explained in my last article for The Writing Cooperative and each time I was left with an unfinished first draft, sometimes just a few chapters into the story, my sense of alienation grew. I became frustrated and when I looked back to other author’s work, my favorite authors and writers, that each year or every other year published a book, I kept asking myself, what do they have that I don’t? How can they do that? I so wanted to know their secret, because there had to be one.

When I got some one hundred pages into my story, suddenly I stopped, because something wasn’t right. I kept re-reading, editing, changing and then stopped again, putting the whole thing aside and telling to myself; I’ll go back to this later, now let’s put down this new idea, it is shouting at me. Two months later I was in the same situation.

And so on; I have eight unfinished novels but three finished ones. One of them is a first draft, the others are second and third.

Good point on these two realities, Anna, thanks for sharing.

Alessandro Tinchini

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Author. Scholar in Dance-therapy. I published “Day-job writers”, a guide for writers busy with demanding day-jobs. NaNoWriMo 2019 winner.