The difference between a good day — or week, or month — is bizarrely enough and often enough for me whether the words/story cooperated.
Recently, the last month or so, things have shut down tighter than Fort Knox.
It’s not block, precisely. I’ve had block, though weirdly not until about ten years ago. Before that block was a matter of opinion and it could be worked around most of the time. Like, I’d be blocked tightly and absolutely on a novel, but another one would flow if I just tried. And sometimes I had to write three novels at once.
This wasn’t — hastens to explain — the newby thing of giving up on a novel halfway through, but more that I was under very tight deadlines and sometimes one novel simply needed more time to percolate, or the scene I’d done seemed to have set everything off on a wrong path, and if I continued it was going to be bad sad and I’d have to rewrite the whole thing. So instead, I’d side step and start getting ahead on other work I’d have to do anyway. Then come back when suddenly I dreamed the solution to the problem, or my brain gave up what I’d been trying to avoid knowing was necessary ahead. (I still mourn Old Joe. Those of you who know, know.)
Real block was different. Once, speaking to John Ringo I described it as my imagination being arid. It was precisely that. I still knew where the plot was going. I could do an outline. But the only thing I could do was follow the outline.
Okay, to explain, for me at least, writing, and the fun part of writing, is something different: it is having stuff just “fall in”. Like, I will have an outline where two friends are having an argument in the diner. That’s fine. The argument will be in the outline (whether written or in my head) and I know it’s happening. But then there will be a couple who just appears, in the corner, having a counterpart to their argument, so that words intrude. In the writing, it seems like a distraction. Or a comic relief. But then, later on, somehow, that other couple will be necessary to the climax, and the fact they exist works to make the world that much more solid and full.
When I had block — which might have been physical. Among other things at the time I was so low on oxygen that any trip to the doctor led to their trying to put me in the hospital overnight — it all went away but strictly what in the written plot would seem to move the story forward.
There was no serendipity, no found objects. The third man from the left who comes in and delivers a message, came in and delivered a message. He didn’t wear a funny hat, or also mention the guy outside who looks threatening or whatever.
Anyway, that’s block to me. I still hit it sometimes, but it’s more of a frustrated, occasional thing, not the years and years of nothing where I had to deliberately pull things out one by one, just as I wanted them, with nothing got for free and nothing fun or funny that I didn’t expect.
However this last month it hasn’t been that. Simply between household disasters and planning a wedding, it’s been completely impossible to sit down and concentrate on writing for long enough to actually get words out.
Which means I’m crabby and annoyed, and just want to go back to the book and finish it.
So, sometimes when you are stuck, it helps to do what I’m doing right now. Sometimes it helps to blow steam. And writing this post has helped me right now.
Therefore, turn about is fair play. Go ahead blow off steam. What is bothering you now about your writing? What do you need to do that’s just not working.
Perhaps explaining your current problem will help you get going again.
As for me I just need to get the wedding done and get the basement re-floored. But before that I’m going to try to finish this book, anyway.
Mad Genius Club 
25 responses to “Lean On Me”
What’s bothering me right now is just lack of time/energy, but I made a breakthrough earlier this week when I realized that I needed to write the hero’s part of the climax first because the heroine’s part, which will be intercut with it, is kind of a counterpoint and I won’t have a good sense for how much of it is actually needed until I finish the hero’s part.
I don’t know that it’s “Block” but I’m suffering from at least “oh squirrel.” I can still do my blog, I find it hard to start, but once the page is up and I’m reviewing the “grist for the mill” it flows.
The novel however– UGH. I’m at about 90% through, it’s the first of a series, space opera, the run up to the final battle of this book. I know roughly what’s going to happen, but I just can’t want to do it. I sit down with best intentions, and “Oh, wait, I promised Kiti that I would fix that chair.” Sit back down, “Oh, I have to look at the recipes for sausages we’re making this weekend and get a list of ingredients together.” And so it goes, including me writing this.
SIGH
I know I find climaxes intimidating in general. Good luck!
Taken out of context….
RUNS pursued by carp.
LOL
Had to get up early to meet the delivery guys, so no, I was not doing “phrasing” this morning 😉
That was an anticlimactic response. 😉
Get a full checkup. When this was happening to me, it was a combination of thyroid (autoimmune) and altitude.
probably a good idea, I just feel scattered. I think much of it is the “waiting for the next shoe” on politics. We’re planning on moving sometime in the next year, and looking at land in more friendly spaces, plus the expectation of anything from WW IV to Civil War 3.0 Electric boogaloo. The guy upstairs is a centipede.
Yeah. Move quicker if you can. Either way we’re crashing HARD early next year. But I’m terrified the bugalloo will break in the first two weeks in October. This might be because I’m going to be out of the country and the idea terrifies me.
Or it might have merit.
I just hope Orange Jose Calvo Sotelo keeps dodging bullets.
Balancing writing life and everything else, and trying to get the WIP done when I keep having other series trying to edge in. The brain-freeze on the WIP broke once I’d amassed enough technical detail to explain what was going on, and why, and how. So it’s flowing … when I can work on it. And other things stop pestering me.
Yeah, the wedding, the bureaucracy, the == Just….
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty is quite interesting.
I think my world is sufficiently on fire right now I’m just doing pure escapeism in my downtime. I’m not sure I even properly feel the characters right now.
At some point things should resolve and I can establish a new equalibrium and figure out if I want to write as my spare time thing.
Once/if I get back on it, I’ll need to do the world building. I’m the odd duck who doesn’t naturally world build for stories, and this one needs it.
Setting is an early massive space habitat that semi-failed and has reprogressed to a mix of tech levels. The story is templated from the ACW, and should roll into a space Western setting. But I don’t have a feel for was that sort of society, half-way stone age, half modern would be like.
Rural countryside that relies on horses and steam trains and doesn’t have cellphone access, yet still have urban cube farm bio-weapon labs. And is sufficiently disconnected from the networked world that honest to god weird west stuff can stay off the radar and away from cameras.
I guess that is probably my next real step: it everything I know about the setting, everything I need to do with the setting, and figure out where the gaps are.
Right now I’m deep in the weeds of analysis paralysis, trying to figure out how to get book 4 from where it is to where it needs to end, rewriting WW2 in the process. Being sick for almost two months didn’t help either.
I have too many things to work on. And getting words out has been like pulling spiderwebs through mud. This has been a result of a combo of health and environment and I’ve dealt with some of it but it’s been slow.
I did manage to get a book finished and out this month. And I’m making progress on other things but it’s slow.
This feels more like a whine than a scream into the void but that’s about where I’m at. I’m grateful for friends who love and support me and give me space to recover.
I am aware that I’ve spent the last… almost year… dealing with unplanned house remodels, and major health issues, and we’re not out of it yet. Hell, we’re not even out of Calmer Half’s “first deal with the nephrosis, so then you can deal with the overdue spinal fusions…” Still waiting on final opinion on whether there’s one last surgery coming to just yank the malfunctioning organ.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that while I’m still mentally thinking of Day Job as part-time, I am pulling two 12-hour shifts and two 9-hour shifts, at minimum, every week, and that’s not part time. Also, this is the busiest we’ve ever been, and Major Things keep happening there…
So, okay, there’s a reason my immune system collapsed, and I spend 17 weeks solid running through 5 courses of antibiotics before the sinus infection cleared up. There’s a reason that my usual diet of podcasts and nonfiction books stopped, and I was only reading brain candy.
…but that lack of usual things to feed the muse is probably why the well didn’t refill, and writing went from regular to dry, and now is only in fits and starts after a couple weeks of aggressively trying to manage stress and health… and dries up as soon as I stop being so aggressive about it, because my plate is too full (including with the writing) to do so.
It’s also likely why the brain keeps skittering off to have several WIPs all in stages of done – because after the stress, the exhaustion, the pain, and the federal publication changes, there’s not enough brain left to hold the full book. Or maybe I’m too tired to see I’m blaming the wrong thing.
But it’s hard to blame the WIP when at my annual checkup, instead of the usual nagging about my weight and such, instead I get this concerned laser focus on my mental health, and a worried lecture about “caregiver fatigue is bad enough even for people who aren’t immunocompromised.”
Apparently the nice medical people don’t believe in the power of black humour, bad coping mechanisms, and coffee to make it through.
If I could just stop being exhausted, and find 4 extra hours in the day to be able to focus on the normal things, I bet the words would come steady and full as fall rains.
Um…. I know it sounds funny when I say this, but SELF CARE, woman!
What is this self care you speak of? I want you to show me by example! 😛
I’ve had times where I know that there’s a story I want to finish…I know where it should go.
I know what I should be writing.
And yet, nothing happens. Doing anything else appeals more than writing.
(I’ve cleaned a lot of my apartment and house because of this…)
The only thing I know is to step back for a few minutes, do something else, and come back. As many times as I must before I can get started again.
Sometimes means there’s a problem. Sometimes means the problem is my being lazy, particularly if the scene requires something I’m not skilled at.
If at that time you’ve taken an anti-hystamine…. That’s what it does to me. Also the blue sweetener.
Have to keep an eye out for blue sweetener, then. And e-numbers, of course.
I sort of follow what Jerry Jenkins says, there’s no such thing as writer’s block. I approach it from the position of being dissatisfied with what’s been written. I stew for a few days until I decide how to fix, or what to change.
I call it a writer’s moment when a solution pops into my head for whatever I don’t like. Or, a plot twist shows up in my mind.
Right now what I don’t like about writing is haven’t been doing it enough….