I recently opened the gates to Everwhyn, and I meant it when I said I wanted to bring you along for the journey. I’m not stopping that train. I’m going to keep working on this book, and I’m going to keep sharing the process along the way. This is one of those moments.
Right now, I’m stuck.
I won’t sit here and tell you I’ve been working on Everwhyn for years because I haven’t. I’ve been working on it for a few months. I have the characters, I have most of the story I want to tell, and I’ve been making my way through chapters and scenes. Somewhere along the way, though, I hit a wall.
I’ve noticed something about myself over the years. I have this habit of spending days or even weeks building the foundation of a story. I love creating worlds, developing characters, figuring out histories, cultures, relationships—honestly, I could spend forever doing that part. Then life gets in the way. I have less time to write, I step away from the story for a while, and eventually I come back to it. Instead of picking up where I left off, I reread everything, convince myself I can do it better, tear it all down, and start over.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that’s not just something I do with writing. It’s a pattern in my life. I do it with games too. I’ll make it halfway through, convince myself I could have done something better, and start a completely new save. I do it with projects. I do it with hobbies. Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that starting over is easier than continuing.
Everwhyn has become a promise to myself not to fall back into that pattern.
The problem is that this week, that promise is being tested.
I’ve been questioning the beginning of Gwen’s story. Not her personality, not what she looks like, not where the story eventually goes, but the foundation it all starts from. I originally had one version of her story, then changed it because I genuinely believed the new version would make the book stronger. Now that I’ve been writing it, though, something doesn’t feel right anymore.
I’ve done what I normally do when I get stuck. I stepped away from it for a few days. I reread what I’d already written. I tried writing through it, hoping it would eventually click. It hasn’t.
The difficult part is that if I decide Gwen’s beginning really isn’t working, this isn’t a matter of rewriting a chapter or changing a conversation. It changes the foundation of the story. The beginning I’ve already written no longer fits, and I’d have to go back and rebuild it. On its own, that doesn’t scare me. What scares me is where that road has led me before.
In the past, going back rarely stopped with rewriting a few chapters. Before I knew it, I was changing names, changing characters, changing the world, changing the plot until it wasn’t even the same story anymore. Eventually I would walk away from it completely and start something new.
That’s exactly what I don’t want to happen with Everwhyn.
So now I’m sitting here trying to figure out whether this is one of those moments where the story is genuinely telling me something isn’t working, or whether changing the foundation is the first step toward falling back into a pattern I’ve been trying to break. Maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow. Maybe it’ll take another week. I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that I promised I’d let you see the process, not just the finished product. Sometimes the process is exciting. Sometimes it’s inspiring. And sometimes it’s sitting in front of a document, questioning whether you’ve made the right decisions and trying to figure out which voice to listen to.
For now, I’m still here. I’m still writing. And I’m still determined that Everwhyn won’t become another story I leave unfinished.
~CC