Tag Archives: writing process

Works

Beating Writers’ Block

2 Comments

This post originally appeared as a guest post on Carol Garvin’s blog, Careann’s Musings. I realized I never shared it here!

The kids are in bed, the house is clean, you’ve spent some quality time with your spouse and you’ve watched your favorite show. Now it’s your time—time to write with nothing hanging over your head. You sit at your computer, fingers poised over the keys and—

Nothing happens.

What do you do? Spend the next two hours checking email and blogs, playing Text Twist and Minesweeper, coming back to your story every half hour without anything new to add and drifting away again until you can’t face your computer anymore and go to bed, strangely empty and guilty?

No! You don’t have to succumb to writers’ block—you can fight it, and you should. What makes a writer vs. a wannabe is perseverance (and the same is true about revisions, finding an agent, getting published, selling books, etc., etc.). Working through writers’ block makes you a stronger, better, more creative writer. And here are eight ways to do it.

Come up with more ideas
Easier said than done, I know, but try brainstorming new events and directions for your story. I recently came across an analysis of the story conference for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The surprising thing about this conference is the sheer volume of ideas—the writer, director and producer threw out ideas while brainstorming, not worrying about how outlandish or stupid they might sound—you never know if it could be made workable.

Recycle an old idea
Did you have an amazing plot twist you never got to use or used in another (preferably unpublished) work, or one you love in someone else’s story? Find a way to work that idea into this story. The mine cart chase scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom originally came from the conference for Raiders, but they didn’t use it there—an instant source for later ideas.

Look for more connections within your work
I got stuck in one WIP when I needed a task for my hero. He’d agreed to do something for the villain in exchange for a hostage, but I was drawing a blank as to what that should be. I tried to think of something the villain could send him after—but finally the right answer came to me. It shouldn’t just be something, it should be something related to the plot. And I had a subplot that could tie back into the main plot (and a minimystery that could be solved) right here.

Write something
You may have to take some time away from your WIP to get the creative juices flowing. You can work on another idea—writing or plotting or planning—or you can find writing prompts to get started. Sometimes focusing on another story idea will give you the boost or idea you need to progress in your first story—just don’t get sidetracked for too long!

Write nothing
Do something mindless—like playing Text Twist or Minesweeper, or doing house or yard work. Do something creative—if you play an instrument, practice. If you do a handicraft—knitting, needlework, woodcarving, knapping—make something. Occupying your hands while letting your mind roam can have great creative rewards.

Erase
As hard as this may be, maybe you’ve written yourself into a corner. Maybe there just isn’t anywhere for the story to go now, and you need to delete the last paragraph or scene or chapter. (Ouch!) Look at where your story took a turn for a dead end and brainstorm another direction.

Read (or watch)
Look for other ideas (and beautiful writing) in other works, in or outside of your genre. You can also watch a movie or TV show and play the “what if” game—what if something happened differently in this scene. (I came up with a whole story idea this way.)

Plot
You can often avoid getting stuck if you plan out where you’re going in advance. Not always, of course—I’m a plotter, and I can still get stuck in the gray areas of my outline. But back before I started plotting out my stories, I began with an ending in mind, but sometimes I spent weeks stopped in the middle, trying to figure out how to get there. Even loose plotting can help to keep the big milestones in mind to keep you moving toward your goals. Plus you can brainstorm in advance and save all those ideas for any lulls.

Beating writers’ block can be tough, but you can do it—and if you’re going to finish, you have to.

What do you think? How do you beat writers’ block?

Photo credits: paper ball—makedonche19; blank page—Chris Blakeley;
I can’t think—Alyssa L. Miller

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Ideas to Beat a Drought

6 Comments

Most (though not all) of us experience some sort of writer’s block or creative drought every once in a while. I’ve been working on one lately, and let me tell you—it’s not fun.

Gabi Pereira of Iggi & Gabi had been dealing with a creative drought recently, too. She asked for suggestions from her brilliant readers, and she got a lot of great ideas to end a creative drought. Here are some of the great suggestions:

From Joel:

  • “Sit down and try to connect with what [your] inner self is needing right now, before it is ready to start writing again.”

From Selena Wolff:

  • Recognize the creative life cycle, and remain confident that the creative mindset will return.

Writing WednesdayFrom Kari Marie:

  • Spend a few minutes a day thinking about what bothers you about your WIP, or reasons why you can’t move forward.
  • Daily journal writing, even if it’s only a sentence or two.

From several people:

  • Get out and live life!
  • Read!
  • Give yourself room to breathe: don’t judge yourself, allow yourself to not write, etc.

This will be part of next week’s Writing Wednesday!

What do you think? How do you beat a drought?

Photo credits: desert—Guilherme Jófili; hand writing—Melanie Cook

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

There’s no such thing as a muse

11 Comments

I’m Jordan and I’m a writer who doesn’t have a muse. And I’m okay with that.

It seems like most writers, and other “creatives,” have a muse—an imaginary personification of their creative capacity. When “the muse strikes,” it’s time to write. When the muse kicks off for the day/week/year, we’re out of luck. It seems like the only time I hear about a muse is when it’s not doing its job:

  • “My muse snaps her gum at me and rolls her eyes at my plot ideas.”
  • “My muse goes after every shiny new idea that crosses my mind like a raccoon with gambling debts. Also, he’s in charge of my similes.”
  • “My muse’s got nothin.”

Having a muse does alleviate some pressure to create (something I think I learned from Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED speech?). It can be draining and stressful to have to come up with everything yourself. If you’re stuck for an idea, dwelling on that fact can make you feel even less creative and more pressure to come up with something.

Maybe it’s pride, but I actually like coming up with ideas myself, or brainstorming with others. I like to think of myself as creative—and good enough and smart enough (and gosh darn it, people like me) to come up with solutions to my problems and ideas I can’t wait to write about. For the most part, I rarely disappoint myself—though it can be a little bit of a struggle when I’m burned out or just taking time off.

I think the biggest problem I have with muses is this idea that we’re abdicating the responsibility and the ability to create ourselves. Clearly not everyone with a muse does this, but some people use the muse less as a tool to encourage creative freedom and more as a slave driver.

As I said a few years ago in comments on a friend’s blog,

I think true genius is one that can still function as a normal human being while mastering his or her art. Those “geniuses” who ditch other people for their labs or their tablets because their fickle muse strikes them momentarily are at the mercy of capricious bouts of insight.

[The person she quoted] seems to be buying into the “genius is the ability to write pure, unmitigated, beautiful truths to power as they flow ceaselessly from my pen—while the muse lasts” school of thought.

For probably 99% of people, however, genius is the stroke of artistry that manifests itself while you’re trudging along—whether that trudging is through the other 70,000 words of your manuscript or through 70,000 diapers. “Genius” and talent, even taken together, rarely go anywhere without hard work, discipline and dedication.

What do you think? Do you have a muse? Is s/he a slacker, or does s/he work as hard as you?

Photo by Happy A

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Z is for Zeal

3 Comments

When I’m writing first drafts, in general, my two favorite parts are the beginning and the end. Usually, I’ve envisioned both of these long before writing, and I’ve been looking forward to them for a long time.

The end is fun because I’ve anticipated it so much, because it’s so satisfying to be done (for now), because it’s the final show down and my chance to have true love conquer all and/or justice to triumph just when it seems impossible. It’s something I’ve imagined and re-imagined, crafting lines of dialogue or action sequences or prose, foreshadowing.

Beginnings are even better. Often I start them before I even intend to, so many ideas and characters and phrases are screaming to get out before I forget them. I’ll have been thinking about a story idea for a week or a month, and all of the sudden, I’m at the computer, just giving it a try. A day or two later, when I’m a chapter or two into it, sometimes I’m so in love with it I send it to a couple friends for an alpha read. (A day after that, I’m ready to tell my husband I’ve started another book—which basically means we’ll see each other again in a couple months 😉 .)

Now, there are of course lots of scenes in the middle that I look forward to, but it’s hard for me to pin down a pattern of which scenes or plot points are most exciting. It’s pretty consistent with beginnings and endings for me. Revising I’m less enthused about, but I do love the purpose and the result—getting better and better!

What do you think? Do you have favorite sections to write? How do you feel about revising?

Photo by The Shopping Sherpa

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

What keeps you going?

7 Comments

Writing a book can be a long process. It’s easy to get discouraged or just plain bored before you reach “The End.”

For me, one of the big things that keeps me going is what Holly Lisle calls “candy bar” scenes:

First, let me define a “candy-bar” scene. It’s one that you’re just itching to write — something sweet enough that you can dangle it on a stick in front of yourself so that you can say, “When I’ve done these next three chapters, I’ll get to write that one.” . . .

Make sure your candy-bar scenes are spread out through the book, not all clumped together. Write down a single sentence for each of them. Don’t allow yourself to do anymore than that, or you’ll lose the impetus to move through the intervening scenes.

Holly Lisle also advises writing the ending first (so you have the goal in mind), writing about people you want to spend time with (because, hey, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with them in the writing process, and you want your readers to want to spend time with them, too), using an outline, and allowing yourself to be surprised. I’ve tried and loved all of those things except writing the ending first (meaning I haven’t tried it, though I might).

What do you think? How do you keep going until you reach “The End”?

Image by Emily Hoyer

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Publishing

More than love

2 Comments

I love writing. I have loved writing for most of my life. But when it comes to pursuing publication, love is not enough.

Love can help you to write every day (if that’s how you work). Love can help you to learn more. Love can make the world a happy, rosy place—remember when you were in love the first time, or when you first fell for the person you’re with now? Everything feels happy and skippy and you just know you’ll be together forever because you’ve got the right one (baby. Uh huh.).

You can love writing, and write every day—and if that’s what you want to do, great! If that makes you happy, you are a lucky, lucky person. Go forth, write and be happy (and never, never submit for publication. The rejection would make you sad, and if writing for yourself is enough, don’t taint that.).

But it takes more than love to do the work that’s required to reach publication (and beyond—it soooo doesn’t end there!). As the very-soon-to-be-published Kiersten White puts it:

This is where you switch from having a hobby to being a writer. The mind-numbing, hour-after-hour, please-I-don’t-want-to-do-this-anymore-let’s-just-watch-Arrested-Development-on-DVD-instead, how-on-earth-is-writing-this-much-work stage. Anyone can write a book. Everyone who wants to should. But it’s only when you put in the work (and make the sacrifices, and give up your social life and your sanity and occasionally lower your personal grooming standard) to take something that was fun and make it into something that is good that I think you cross from being a hobbyist to being a writer.

Writing is WORK. The best work, sure, but work nonetheless.

To use our love analogy again, let’s say you get married—and then comes reality. Suddenly, the pure euphoria of being together everysecondofeveryday isn’t there. You have an argument. You yell at each other. You don’t feel that overpowering high in his/her presence.

Suddenly, it takes more than love to keep going. It takes commitment. And it takes work. You keep going because you know the love is there, because you know this person/book is worth it—but love isn’t enough to get you there by itself.

How do you stay committed to your work? How do you cope when your love of writing isn’t enough to keep going?

Inspired in part by The Fantasy of Passion by Travis Robertson; photo by Victoria

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Becoming a story architect

6 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 24 in the series The plot thickens (Mwahahaha)

I think most of us have to try a few Winchester Mystery Stories before we’re ready to become story architects.

floor plan sketchI really like the analogy of architecture here because I like floor plans a floor plan isn’t a complete house. It’s a sketch of what you plan to build. It’s an easy way to look at a scaled-down model of where you think you want the major rooms to go, where the appliances will be, where the doors are, etc. It isn’t your house.

The floor plan can change even after you start building your story. Sometimes we “remodel” as we “build”—we decide this doorway should be a window and the front entrance should go here. We change the door to a double door; we upgrade the A/C or the wiring; we knock out a wall and add a new bathroom. We scrap the entire second floor.

Having a floor plan doesn’t mean we have to build that house—or even that we’d all build the same house with the same floor plan. But having a floor plan means we don’t end up six months into the project with 123 bedrooms, 16 dining rooms and no kitchen or bathrooms.

On the other hand, the floor plan is just a basic sketch, which can be improved upon, revised, and changed during the process of writing. In fact, you probably wouldn’t recognize the house just from the floor plan.

For me (and others), the floor plan is such a basic sketch that once we’ve gotten that built, we still have a long way to go before we have a finished product. Once we have the events down in the first draft, we still have revising and finishing to do—furnishing, painting, decorating, accessorizing (moving all our crap in 😉 ).

There’s a long way from the bare drywall to the furnished home we hope to end up with. And even after we slap on the paint and get our boxes through the door, it’ll still take a lot of work—and maybe some more paint, some help from friends and professionals, a lot of reading catalogs and home magazines. . . .

But finally, after all that, we have a home we can be proud of—and one that we didn’t have to completely rebuild six times. (Okay, I’ve probably beaten that analogy to death.)

What do you think? Do you like to consider yourself a “story architect? How much detail (or freedom) do you need in your “floor plan” to make a house work?

Next week, we’ll start looking at methods of plotting—and don’t forget, I’m looking for volunteers to talk about how they plot! And tomorrow—free goodies!

Photo credit: floor plan—Richard Crowley; dry wall—Pattie; room and photo—Christopher Barson

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Making it up as she went along–the Winchester Mystery Story

4 Comments

Larry Brooks, “the story fixer,” had a recent post that really got me thinking about this—Story Structure vs. Story Architecture: “Dude… what’s the diff?”

All stories, says Brooks, have structure. And, to employ my own analogy, so do all buildings. But not all buildings are created equal:

Winchester Mystery House Scary Exterior Tower

Winchester Mystery House Stairs to the ceiling

winchester mystery house

You might recognize this place, or the legend behind it. The owner believed that her house must be under construction always, or she would die. But they couldn’t use a master building plan.

Considering that, the Winchester Mystery House is pretty well-built. Yeah, it has stairs that lead to nowhere and doors that open out from the second floor (no stairs on that one—maybe move those first stairs over there?). It’s fun—it’s a blast to explore, and I bet Sarah Winchester had an awesome time throwing in every element she could think of.

It has a decent foundation—instead of leveling it, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake only knocked off the top three stories. After the quake it stood four stories. The remaining structure is a rambling, 160-room, 4.5-acre mansion. It required more than 20,000 gallons of paint—and it constantly needed painting.

I think we’ve all gotten to the end of a story, looked back and seen our own Winchester Mystery Structure. The Winchester Mystery House has structure. In some sense, it has architecture—but not really. There is no plan, and the closest thing they had to a designer (architect) was a crazy woman.

And “rambling” is right. Dead ends, doors and promises that go nowhere, accidental MacGuffins. . . . After round 28,657 of revisions, I got tired of writing stories that looked like they were designed by a crazy woman.

What do you think? Have you ever written a “Winchester Mystery Story”?

Photo credits: exterior shot and stairs to nowhere courtesy of the Winchester Mystery House; rooves—the_photographer; windows to windows—Emily Hoyer

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!