THE Group for Authors! discussion

There's a moment, maybe you know it, when you're staring at a chapter you've rewritten four times and you genuinely cannot tell if it works.

I don't mean whether it's good. That question feels almost luxurious by comparison. I mean whether it functions. Whether the sentences even do what you need them to do.

I'm deep in revisions on my second novel right now, and I've been living in that uncertainty for weeks.

The first book taught I could finish something. It taught me how to structure suspense, how to plant a detail in chapter three that detonates in chapter twenty-seven. But I'm finding this one harder. The stakes are different, not plot stakes, craft stakes. I'm asking more of myself, and I'm not always sure I'm meeting the ask.

It seems the doubt doesn't get smaller with experience. It just gets more specific.
When I was drafting, the fear was quite simple really... Can I do this at all? Now the fears are different. Will this scene land the way I felt it when I wrote it? Will readers understand what I'm doing with this unreliable narrator, or will they just think I made a mistake? Is this intimate scene serving the emotional arc, or does it feel gratuitous? Am I handling trauma with the weight it deserves, or have I cheapened something that deserves better?

That last one is really taking its toll on me.

I write about violation. Not as titillation or a plot device, but as something my protagonist carries in her body, that shapes how she moves through the world, how she trusts, how she touches and is touched.
Getting that right feels like a responsibility I'm not sure I'm qualified to hold. Every revision, I ask myself - Is this honest? Is this careful? Would a survivor read this and feel seen, or feel used?
I don't know the answer. I can only know my intention, and intention doesn't guarantee execution.

The erotic elements add another layer of uncertainty. There's a particular challenge in writing desire alongside trauma, in showing a character who has been violated also experiencing pleasure, agency, connection. The two aren't separate; they inform each other. But threading that needle without sensationalising, without simplifying and without making it seem like one cancels the other out... I've rewritten entire chapters because I couldn't find the balance.

And then there's the silence after you send pages to someone you trust. That waiting. Wondering if they'll see what you saw or if the emotion that felt so present while you were writing it translates at all, or if you've just been talking to yourself.

Will anyone read this?

That question used to feel like the big one. Now I realise the scarier version is - Will anyone feel it?

I don't have a resolution. That's not what this post is. I'm sitting in the discomfort tonight, and I suppose I'm curious whether it's just me.

Do you live here too? In this space between what you meant and what you managed? How do you keep going when you can't tell if it's working?

I'd genuinely like to know.