I probably should have posted this first, if I was going to blog about getting stuck. Because one of the more important things a writer needs to do when they’re stuck, before trying to apply any of the techniques I was talking about, is to figure out why they are stuck.
Diagnosis is important, because different kinds of stuckness require different solutions. For instance, about 95% of the time when I get stuck, the reason is one of the following:
a) an attack of insecurity (oh, god, I can’t write, what made me think I could, I don’t remember how to do this, this is all dreck, dreck, dreck…) Yes, published writers get these, too.
b) a failure to think things through.
c) an attack of sheer laziness (gee, what a gorgeous day; I wish I could go to the beach… oops! I’ve got writer’s block. I guess I will go to the beach…)
d) knowing the next bit is going to be hard for some reason – I’m going to need a new technique I’m not confident of using yet, or it’s a particular kind of scene I loathe writing but still need to have (transitions — we hatess them, preciousss, we hatess them forever)
When the problem is a), c), or especially d), the solution is to just sit down and do it anyway. So it’s dreck, so it’s a pretty day, so it’s a hard scene — tough. Write it anyway. I can fix it later, but I can’t fix it until I’ve written it.
When the problem is b), just sitting down to write isn’t going to help unless I’ve done some of the thinking-through. (Some writers can do the thinking by writing it out, but I’m not one of them.)
And then there’s that other 5% of the time…
These are the times when I’m stuck because my backbrain is much smarter than I am. It knows that there is something dreadfully, seriously wrong with the story, or about to be wrong with it if I continue in the direction I’m going, and it digs its little feet in and absolutely refuses to move until I fix whatever-it-is. This kind of stuckness usually happens when I think I do know what happens next, at least to some extent. They leave town; they have a conference and decide X; they meet a new character who’s going to be terribly important to the rest of the story.
Trouble is, those particular characters wouldn’t leave town just yet; they’d actually decide to do Y, not X; the new character really doesn’t belong in this book. So I get stuck. I can slog my way a bit further, because I think I have some idea of what happens…I have a Plan. But when I do, the story gets harder and harder to write, and eventually bogs down for good until I go back to that spot and have them stay in town, decide to do Y, etc.
The last time I overrode my backbrain, I had to toss about 14 chapters and very nearly start the book over from scratch. I try really hard not to do this any more.
Your 5% is my 95%. My current WIP is frustrating me because it has such a weird process – I need to let every bit sink in, load my backbrain with more research or mythology or just general worldbuilding, and then write another bit. It drives me insane, and it’s the slowest I’ve written. I’ve stopped fighting it and taken to switching to another project whenever this one grinds to a halt, beause much as I try, it *will not* grow faster, and I might as well get out some words in the meantime and remind myself that 300 words/day is not going to last forever.
And it wants to be trilogy. SIGH.
>> Trouble is, those particular characters wouldn’t leave town just yet…
Sounds like The Raven Ring! Of course I don’t know what writing it was like, but as a reader, I thought one of the neat things about the book was the way that Eleret kept telling us that she was leaving town *now*, but the narrative insisted that she stay and that everything needed to be worked out in town.
I love the Raven Ring! I thought it was so awesome that the book broke tradition of characters traveling. It made the story more unpredictable and fun. (Well, and I had a crush on Karvonen Aralico. Yeah, I’m too lazy to check if I spelled his name properly…)
Reason C. made me laugh out loud. (oops, I’ve got writer’s block, guess I WILL go to the beach.) that’s me all over.
Green_knight – That’s why I keep saying this is how I do it. Although my current WIP (the sequel to Thirteenth Child seems to be moving along a similar path to the one you describe. Unfortunately, there are *deadlines* involved, so I need to, erm, figure out how to make things sink in faster…
Odette – You hit the nail on the head! The characters who wouldn’t leave town were the ones in The Raven Ring, and it drove me crazy until around Chapter 11, when I finally gave up on my original plan for good and just went with what they wanted.
Chicory – Well, I can’t actually take credit for breaking the mold; it was all my characters’/backbrain’s idea. I thought I was going to write a road trip book. No, really.
They were pretty smart, then. 🙂
I’ve just dug up a story about a heroine who was supposed to be cold and logical with a sophisticated, Oscar Wilde type wit -except she recently revealed that the reason the book stalled out was that she’s actually a hot-headed revolutionary.
Fortunately for me, revolutionaries are fun to write about.
A hot-headed revolutionary with an Oscar Wilde type wit sounds really interesting! 🙂
I’ve turned my writing into a daily habit (with the same weight as doing the dishes) so that I can avoid #a, c, d. As for b, by making myself writing daily I force myself to think things through.
Alex-The daily habit thing works for a lot of people. I’m not sure we mean the same thing by “thinking things through” though – or if we do, I’m not sure how working every day solves it as a getting-stuck problem. Unless you mean that if you work every day, and you get stuck because you didn’t think things through, you have to go back and do the thinking in order to get unstuck for the day?
That’s it – if I get stuck I have to go back and think things through because each day I have to produce something and if I’m stuck and not producing anything then I need to get unstuck and fast.
For example in my current WIP, the bad guy appears out of nowhere and as I got closer to the scene where he appears I was slowing down. A minor character appeared as a kind of herald to the bad guy and I stopped completely. I then had to think things through more clearly and realized that the real bad guy is the MC’s grandmother who’s in the first few chapters. What I thought was the bad guy is only a herald for a confrontation with the grandmother. Boom! Unstuck and writing again!
If I wasn’t doing daily writing then I might have just left it as is and let the book stall completely.
Alex – That’s pretty much exactly the sort of thing I wass talking about with my “other 5%,” except that it’s taken me years to learn to listen to my backbrain when it starts slowing me down. Do you work with an outline? I usually do, and I think that makes it a bit harder…I know who the bad guy is supposed to be and what he’s up to, because it’s in the outline, so it’s harder to shift gears when my backbrain starts jumping up and down to try and make me see that it’s really the grandmother.
Yes, I too work to an outline and yes it’s much harder to see what’s going wrong because the outline seems to be making sense…
My problem is that I get stuck thinking over details or deciding details. Sometimes I get stuck and I just do not know where I should take the story. But the farthest in a story that I have ever gotten is going along just with my plan. I think part of the reason why is that it is a fictional character in a real time period. It is sort of hard for that story to go out of line, since the said time period, there is very little known about it. When I finish the story, (drawing close)though, I have no idea what to do with it. I really appreciate the blog entry, though. Getting bogged down a lot.