This week I experienced something that scared the living daylights out of me: I had the stories in my head; I had the next scene ready to go and… nothing.
To be fair, this has happened before. It’s like I know how to write, I know how to do it, but I can’t. There’s a disconnect, and I can’t start. (To be fair, the same has happened about speaking foreign languages that I know how to speak, but I just can’t. Its not shyness, it’s weird break.)
But when it happened before, there was a biochemical reason: I’d had anti histamines or even an excess of aspartame. No, I don’t know why. But that’s the effect.
However, these three days I didn’t have any of that, and it scared me.
Look, I’ve pushed it before. Sometimes it even works. But everything is very slow and takes forever. And I can’t say it was my best work.
Well, it passed, and I suspect — honestly — mostly it might be that I haven’t been sleeping very well. After a while it has a cumulative effect.
But it gave me the idea of writing this post for those of you who are … younger in writing, or who perhaps haven’t experienced as much of “when it stops” as I have.
So, a list of what can happen to make it all stop, in no particular order.
When it stops:
1- Sometimes it stops because you’ve reached the mid point of my novel. I used to say that each of my novels stopped two times. Now they usually only stop if life interrupts them, but life does that a lot.
What I mean by this, is you’re on a schedule, you’re working on this novel, and then…. suddenly. You sit down and…. nothing. You feel like the whole thing is dead. You don’t want to continue writing it.
Okay, so, when you start a novel, it’s all shiny and new and beautiful, and you see this huge thing in your head. But each time you make decisions: which character to write/which scenes to leave in and which not to portray, you’re narrowing the scope of the novel.
So you started out with this beautiful, massive, impossible to write thing, and your novel will be a pale reflection.
Well, cry me a river ducky.
Solution: Just push through. If you keep writing by sheer dodgedness, it comes back to life. Afterwards you won’t be really sure when or where it died.
2- You’ve had this idea a long time. You’ve been waiting for the time to be right to write it. You were waiting for the kids to grow up, or to retire, or whatever.
Now you sit down to do it, and the idea is as appealing as day old fish. You just can’t.
Depending on how long it’s been, it’s probably just dead. or it isn’t, but the idea was for someone you used to be. It doesn’t appeal to you as you are now. Nothing makes it as clear to a writer that people change over time than this effect.
Put it back in the idea box, whether real or virtual. Sometimes, years later, things come around again and that idea is the most exciting thing you ever heard of. Might be different from when you started, but it’s alive again.
I’ve revived ideas over 20 years old with no ill effects. (no, not that one. That one never died.)
Solution: If it’s dead, let it go. But don’t fully forget it. Ideas sometimes get a second lease on life, decades later.
3- You wrote extensively in a universe, took a pause for whatever reason. And now the books just.won’t. gel.
Well… I face that with the reverted series. Darkships, weirdly, less so. Or perhaps not weirdly. Shifters gave me issues because it was very much a product of our life in Colorado. I could get incidents for it by going to Pete’s for dinner. Now…
Well, here’s the thing, I figured out I could not — could not — write the lockdown or anything around that time. I’d always written the series “contemporary” loosely understood though it feels “out of the world” as cozies often do. And now I couldn’t. They were diner owners. There’s no way the mess didn’t affect them.
So?
So I’m writing in the time just before. Say around 2018. The lockdown will come in, but then the framework is set because they’re living through weird “Ragnarok” times, which in universe has its own implications. And that works. So…
Solution: Find a way to work with it. If the series is tied to a place and time, see if you can move it. Fast forward somehow and come to the present. Or move it to another place, if it can be done. If you wrote more than a book in the series, it’s likely not dead-dead. It just needs jiggling.
4 – Sometimes things don’t stop because they never start. I have no idea if you’ll ever need to do this, now indie is a thing but… probably. There will be an anthology you promised to be in, or this sweet gig that drops on your lap, writing something someone can’t do because they’re sick, or something, and …. baby needs new shoes.
You sit there, staring at a plot and characters who are just NOT you, and you can’t force yourself to write page after page for over 100k words in something that feels like pulling teeth.
Well, sometimes, you pull the teeth, however…
Solution: Make it yours. Depending on how much freedom you have. In my super-secret and well paid write for hire I had certain parameters, such as historic and the supernatural element. But I could take it to an era of history I really liked. And I could twist the fantasy element to feel RIGHT to me.
Now, if you’re working with a tightly scripted property, this is harder, but you usually can still put something of you in there. Give a character a turn for snappy dialogue. Make a place described in the book some place you like. Invent something that you can subtly lace through that makes the book feel yours and right.
Now I don’t promise that will work, but it will work in 90% of the times.
Not all story worlds who seem dead are. And you can always give them CPR and hope they come back.
Ah Ah Ah Ah Staying Alive.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “When It Stops – by Sarah A. Hoyt”
For me, this manifests in a wrong turn somewhere while writing. I had one book in act 2 just thin out into what I named to myself as “the tepid swamp of niceness”, as though someone had OD’d on Prozac.
When I came to a halt with only my mental torso above water, I had to take a hacksaw and find the point in the (pantser) plot where it all drifted downhill and ruthlessly prune that out. Maybe I could have pushed through it, but why would a reader want to if I didn’t, and what would be the point? I could have been much longer in the wild, and much more recalcitrant about dealing with it, so I’m grateful for the warning experience.
Oh, I forgot that cause. It used to happen to me all the time. Not so much now.
I’m a big believer in the self-care checklist:
Hydration – drink more water. Yes, drink a glass of water, and after that, try to remember how much water you’ve drunk today. As they said to new soldiers in Desert Shield, “if you don’t need to piss, you’re not hydrated enough.”
Electrolytes – especially if you’ve been working or sitting in the heat. Eat a pickle. Did it taste really good? Then you need more salt.
Food – when was the last time you ate something healthy and nutritious? Fix that.
Antihistamines – can you breathe through your nose? Then it’s probably well past time to take an antihistamine. Yes, antihistamines can stop the words… but you know what? So can allergens. Once the antihistamine has kicked in, start cleaning.
Shower – especially if you’ve just been cleaning. Wash the excess allergen load off, so the antihistamines will be more effective. If you haven’t been cleaning, trust me, you’ll feel better after a shower. They make us more human… and sometimes they unblock the words, too. Feel free to get a pack of shower crayons to write plot notes to yourself so you don’t lose ’em when you get out and dry off.
Exercise – if you’ve been cleaning, it may count. The human body was not designed to sit, staring at a fixed point; it was designed to move. The limbic system and the gut depend on movement to help process and flow. So get up and move for a while.
Sunlight – while popping Vitamin D pills will help, it’s not the only thing that our skin creates with sunlight that’s good for the complex biochemical feedback loops that we call a body. Go get 10 minutes of sunlight a day, and it’ll help physical and mental health.
Sleep – how much did you get last night? And the night before that? And the night before that? It’s not just acute sleep dep, it’s chronic sleep deprivation. You can think you got away with doing it… but the body keeps the score.
Sleep Hygeine – if you’re not getting much sleep, time to take a look at the things surrounding the inability. How late in the day are you having caffeine? Are you napping, and if so, how long? What temperature is your bedroom? Are you running blue light filters on your electronics after sunset? How many lights / how bright is your house when you’re trying to sleep?
When was the last time you changed your house air filters?
How about the filters in any rooms, or medical equipment like your CPAP?
…
And if it’s not that, then check the Work-Not-In-Progress. And apply Sarah’s awesome advice.
And if the pickle doesn’t taste salty, you need a lot more.
THAT!
Pickles/pickle juice are “Rennie Gatorade.”
The not-a-joke goes….
At the Reniassance Faire…
The new folks drink water.
The slightly experienced drink Gatorade.
The “old hands” drink pickle juice.
Sometimes you just need to transplant the functional organs of the failed story into something else. There is one of my books where the only thing surviving from the failed first draft is “queen loses her city to siege and bad advisors, falls in love with a balloonist.”
Sometimes, you have a vague idea of where to go, but haven’t laid the groundwork for it yet, and adding groundwork to the existing partial draft is part of the process of becoming unblocked.
Other leading causes of writer’s block in my experience include lack of sleep, dieting, overeating, insufficient protein, emotional stress, and physical stress.
I think part of my problem is I don’t want to spend the time being bored.
It is a lot easier to write when I’m dumping out an unpleasant headspace, but that doesn’t go on forever (and would suck if it did). And after that, there is just time I need to stare at the page and try things to get a story out. And isn’t it so much easier to go do any of the other things I wanted to get done today?
I mean, I’m not sure how to do the next part or the transition, but I have idea son what it needs to do, but I’m never going to get there if I don’t spend the butt in seat time to get it moving.
You can try rewarding yourself for doing the difficult parts.
I had a story set in a school where I had invented all sorts of things, done a fairly big “world build” for it and then — the pandemic. I could NOT write about being in a school during that time. I sort of want to pick it up again but I’m not going to include that soul-sucking wretchedness. I want the messy parts of the book to stem from something else.
I generally “just stops” in the outline stage.
My go-to rule is take whatever happened next, and reverse it. I sent the heroine into a market to find out information? A dragon attacked and she fled having learned nothing. (Dragon had been introduced already.)
The biggest thing for me is the translation phase.
You can’t explain the thoughts in your head until they get down on paper. And those thoughts take a lot of effort to get onto paper.
That’s what usually gets me. The translation process just takes so much work.
I think in words. But younger son who thinks in images reports same issue.
It’s one of the reasons why I hate the fact that I can’t draw-I can see most of the scenes in my stories.
I figured out one of my problems. I only want to write The Good Stuff. The exciting parts, action and combat and WTF? moments. The profound parts, where ancient mysteries are revealed or the character has an epiphany. The satisfying parts, when some slimy asshole finds out the hard way that he just F*d with the wrong people.
The parts in between? The necessary continuity that provides context and makes those parts Good in the first place? Writer Brain go ‘Meh.’ I call those the ‘mortar’ that holds the bricks of a story together. Without it, all you’ve got is a pile of bricks. They could be the world’s greatest bricks, but if they’re just piled up all in a jumble, that ain’t a story. Even if they’re laid out neatly, if there’s nothing holding them together they won’t make much sense.
I’m in the middle of grinding out some mortar right now. I’ve got some really great bricks coming up, but I have to slog through this wet gray cement get to them. One difficulty is finding the right degree of detail to include. There has to be enough that the bits of foreshadowing and little clues about the character’s mysterious nature don’t jump out and thwack the reader in the face, but not so much that it induces detail fatigue. It’s a tough balancing act.
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“I am still human. Of course I can lie. Unlike you, I choose not to.”
Read Dwight Swain and understand how important the transition is. Then you’ll get all hot and bothered about Finessing IT with style and all. makes it more fun.
I find those less exciting parts a good place for humor, bonding, rueful discoveries, and all the day-to-day human experiences that are important to the characters for grounding, if not to the plot for actions.
Part of what makes a “cozy” flavor within any genre is the moments in-between. When a fellow’s been joking around with his friends and not long thereafter is staggering around assaulted by disaster, the contrast is deepened.
John Gardner sagely observed in one of his books that writing is often very like writing class exercises because you are continually writing things in your books not for their own sake but because they are needed. Like, you need a storm to be dramatic enough to convince the reader that Molly would call Jack because of it.