Part of Newton’s First Law of Motion is that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. And while I feel confident in saying that Newton did not have writing in mind when he wrote his law, I think the principal can still apply.

The easiest way to keep writing is to keep forward momentum.

Recently, I’ve been going through my publisher’s developmental edits for my debut novel coming out next year. While I worked through the manuscript linearly, I didn’t go through all of the comments and edits as I came across them. Rather, I did the edits that I was able to do and fix. When I came across an edit that I couldn’t solve at the moment or didn’t have the mental stamina for, I skipped it. I didn’t want to get stuck on a comment or a scene and loose my motivation or momentum. I needed to keep moving forward.

By the time I’ll turn my edits into my publisher, I’ll have gone through the manuscript three times, working on the edits in layers that preserved my focus, motivation, and creativity. It will have allowed me to maintain my momentum instead of getting bogged down and stopped. It’s also allowed me to reread some edits and tweak them a little more. 🙂

Keep moving forward in your writing. If you’re stuck on a scene, write in a place holder like [John and Jane sneak into the hideout] and move onto what happens next. During my edits, I literally had a highlighted pink paragraph that was something along the lines of, “Some some of dialogue from [character] that ties back to chapter [X] that’s something about [spoilers].” When I first came to that scene, I had no idea what that dialogue needed to be. So I skipped it and circled back later. When I did, it was easy to write the new words, partly because my imagination had had extra time to muse on the scene and because I had more creativity and mental stamina at that point.

Writing and editing don’t have to be completely linear. Do it in whatever manner works best for you and gets the story written. Because to write a story, you have to be writing. So keep moving forward.