A Bit of Persuasion
Not to put a damper on everyone’s fun, but I’ve been a bit stuck recently. :-O I know, I know, it’s against Sven’s policy, “you can’t fix a blank page,” “just write crap,” and all those other fun “but in chair, hands on keyboard” aphorisms, but occasionally, you just get stuck.
My problem is that I’ve been rewriting a section, and I’m running into the same difficulties as I did the last time I wrote it, which of course, is negating the purpose of said rewrite. Very frustrating, eh? But I have two choices:
1) Figure it out.
2) Give up.
Two ain’t happening. So I dove into all my usual tricks. I brainstormed, I made lists of six things that could happen, I wrote it from another point of view, I read a book I really enjoyed to see if it would jumpstart my love of storytelling, I took a lot of long walks and hot showers, I did yoga, I meditated, I wrote five different versions, I read it out loud — in passing, I recommend all of these methods, which have worked for me at one time or another — and I whined to my friends.
Oh, how I whined.
And my friends, being writers themselves, whined back. One was having trouble with her revisions. One was having trouble balancing her deadline and what the family expected from the impending holidays, and one had just lost his job. (We drank our lunch that day.) This, by the way, also sometimes gets me going. Reflecting on how much harder other people have it and still produce is often the metaphorical bitchslap I need to get me going again.
And finally, a few nights ago, one friend told me about a time that she had been in the same situation as my character. And I started thinking about it as not a scene from my the book, but as part of my character’s mindset. I’ve never been much of one for character questionnaires or interviews — I tried one once and when I asked my character what her favorite ice cream flavor was, she threatened to knock my front teeth in — but hey, I’ll try anything once twice, and this character isn’t the type to knock anyone’s teeth in. So I tried it. I tried thinking about (i.e. “asking her”) how my character felt, beyond what she felt about the things happening to her in the story.
She’d been raised by a single mom, in very reduced circumstances. They had a rocky relationship — Lorelais Gilmore they were not — and the teen angst and parental embarrassment was hitting my protag pretty hard. And yet, you can’t grow up like that without having a whole host of memories of you and your mom against the world. No matter how angry you are now. That’s just the way it works.
And finally, she let me know. She told me a whole bunch of memories. And even though none of them will be in the book, and very little of their flavor actually made it into the text, it colored all of her reactions for the whole section that was giving me fits.
What are your tried and true methods of bringing yourself past the blocks? And what do you always say will never work for you? Think you ought to try it?
December 11th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
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.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
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.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
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.
December 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am
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!!
December 12th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
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.