Comments on: A Bit of Persuasion

By: Candice Gilmer

Candice Gilmer — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:15:46 +0000

I have “tea” with my characters. They tend to meet me in a coffee shop or some other public location, we drink coffee (which, of course, I note how they take their coffee, a very enlightening image, I must say), and we talk.

One character, my male protag, surprised me with how he kept turning questions back on me, and I began to understand why my female protag would get annoyed with him. Heck, I was getting annoyed with him.

By: Joely

Joely — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:03:02 +0000

When I get stuck, my characters write letters. (Formal questionaire/interviews don’t work that well for me typically.) The characters talk about their feelings, their past, the current situation; whatever they’ll tell me, I take. The important thing, here, is that it’s the CHARACTER’S voice. Those first-person letters really get to the guts of emotion I need to figure out where I’ve gone wrong. It’s always my fault, evidently. Eventually, they all tell me where I screwed up!!

By: Dawn

Dawn — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:12:28 +0000

What usually works for me is just putting the WIP aside for one (or twenty) days. When I get back to it, I will usually have a better perspective of things and the writing improves. I think that has something to do with the fact that I get ’stale’ if I write continuously for too long at a time.

What doesn’t work for me is the hot shower / hot bath trick. I do that and I come out of it…clean…but not very productive! I still take them of course, but they’re more for hygiene rather than art.

By: Lori

Lori — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:29:50 +0000

What recently helped me through a block was deciding which character in the chapter had the most emotionally at stake. This seems pretty basic but it’s not always that easy to tell. I first chose the daughter’s POV because she seemed to have the most at stake. As I wrote, I got blocked and felt the writing was blah and uninteresting. Then I had one of my shower epiphanies and I realized that the mother had even more at stake. I switched POV and viola! The words flowed, the story moved and I enjoyed what I was writing.

I wish it was always that ‘easy’ (ha!), but it’s not.

By: Vicki

Vicki — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:23:40 +0000

I love it when my characters begin telling me things that will not make it in the book. That’s when I finally know them.

The getting stuck part…hate that one! when it happens I try everything from rereading what I’ve written to editing pages before and nothing happens until my muse decides she’s ready again. It’s crazy but once she starts it is usually much better than anything I would have written during that up against a wall time.