The last time that I had a chapter that I just didn't feel like writing, I didn't write at all for a couple of months. I knew what I wanted to say in the chapter, I just didn't feel the like writing it. It's not that the chapter was a bad chapter, it dealt with things that needed to be said and happen, but they were not directly related to the main plot. Of course, most novels have side stories and the main plot line can have effects that can widen out the breadth of the narrative, but that doesn't always mean that the author feels the urge to work on those sections as much as other sections.
Last night, I made myself finish up another chapter that I just didn't want to write. Normally when I write, I will sit down and write complete chapters at a time. But, when I don't really want to write for some reason, I'll end up writing just part of a chapter. Over the last week, I sat down four different days and was only able to get part of this chapter written each time. Once again, I knew most of the details before I even started the chapter. I had thought about a lot of the specifics of what would happen in this chapter a number of times over the past month or so. I knew what would be covered in this chapter before I made all of that progress on the book over the holidays. But, I just didn't want to write it down for some reason. However, I am pretty far along in the book and I want to try and finish up the initial draft relatively soon, so, I knew that I didn't want to waste a couple of more months due to a chapter not wanting to be written. Thus, I slogged my way through writing the chapter.
The new chapter ended up being longer than my average chapters, so I didn't scrimp on words, but when I read it to my best friend on the phone (as I have done with all of the chapters of this book), it just sounded awkward. Forcing myself to get through writing it resulted in text that did not flow like my writing normally does. I always smooth out edges as I go back and edit the chapters, but this chapter is going to take a lot more work when editing than normal to clear up all of the choppiness. But, don't worry, I will smooth it out. Just not right now. I'm sure that it will be easier coming back to clean it up after I've written a few chapters that don't have me looking for any excuse to step away from the keyboard.
