I like to think of my brain as the world’s greatest anti-computer. Computers work firmly on the GIGO principle. Garbage In. Garbage Out – as so many of the attempts at AI have shown – where political correctness garbage was fed in… with amusing to catastrophic results, or where they’ve become self-licking ice-cream cones, taking garbage AI text as factual… and generating even more garbage. My brain, however, is infinitely superior to that. It can take perfectly good data and turn it into garbage. Well, fiction, anyway.
But there is another interesting aspect to my writing-thought-process: that is the “I know something is wrong” gland in my brain. The poor thing suffers from hypertrophy -at least in my head. It was supposed to warn me that things were too quiet when my kind were sneaking up on the dinner — meaning that there was a sabertooth tiger frightening everything into silence and I was about to become dinner instead. You know: that alarm bell when everything SEEMS fine, but your brain is adding up little cues that aren’t. Often it doesn’t tell you what is wrong, just that something definitely is.
This comes under the ‘bloody annoying’ and ‘paralysis’ reaction. Paralysis -stopping dead when you somehow feel the course is wrong, makes great sense genetically where that next step could be the last, but when you’re trying to push ahead with a story, is just painful. I’ve got to work out what it is that is jamming me up. And I often really don’t know. My subconscious editor has kicked in: he’s just not communicating well.
Sometimes, I get it quite quickly. I’ve missed something, gone off on a wrong tack. My subconscious plays the scenarios (yes, that is what I do, consciously too, repeatedly ‘play’ what is going to happen if my character does/says x – which is why the start of books is so much slower for me to write than the finish. The number of options is closing out near the end, the start has a sea of possible/probable paths.).
Sometimes I have to go back to beginning of the book and re-read, looking for the mis-step (yes, I have chopped about 30K of wrong direction once. That hurt.) Very rarely… I just can’t. I don’t know what is wrong, it’s just wrong. I’ve only found two ways out of that. Fester (leave the book, write something else. The subconscious still keeps picking on it like a scab with something nasty under it.) or give it to someone else. That has worked a couple of times, but is not infallible either.
Yes, I have just been through it. I needed another villain, one my heroes could foil, eventually. Natural disaster was interesting, but while survival is the story, the human working against them adds an entirely different layer to the tale.
So: what works for you? Does this happen to you too?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “The subconscious editor”
When it struck me especially hard in my 6th book, I gave it a personal name, for the plot situation where I finally realized where my characters were, storywise — mired in The Tepid Swamp of Niceness.
It only cost me a couple of chapters, but it was an absolute barrier for awhile when it happened. Now that it’s got a name, it’s easier for me to detect it oozing up from below.
Mine’s the opposite “You can’t kill *that* character!”
Yeah, currently stuck, but at least (this time) I realized it before I wrote much of the scene.
This happens to me now and then. I’ll be chugging along nicely, then all of a sudden the story comes to a halt and I can’t make it work. After the first few times I realized that this is a sign I’ve gone wrong somewhere, and I have to go back, figure out where and how, and fix it. I’ve found that it helps to talk through the roadblock with my long-suffering wife (or one of my long-suffering daughters).
“Does this happen to you too?”
It totally does. You’ve described my battle to to ‘t’ Dave. I’ve had to go and remove entire chapters of ‘wrong direction’ because I get someplace and the characters all say “So, this is what you had in mind? Are you kidding me?”
They’re snarky sometimes. ~:D
not only do I “play out” the “what our hero does” but also what the bad guys are going to do, which is what’s messing with me now. The bad guys are way too liable to win.
Yeah, I try not to go in for the all-powerful villain thing; I prefer heroes who are competent enough but a bit hamstrung by having to look after the innocent bystanders.
in this case I needed “trailer park elves” but it needed to fit in the Fisher series, which means they end up going underhill.
My most recent cases of being blocked on the current WIP and the book before it amounted to me needing to pay more attention to the setting and supporting characters in order to get all the ducks in a row.
When I hit a roadblock in an outline I sometimes flip what I was expecting to happen. They’re going here? Hah! A flood takes out the bridge.