May 21st, 2009
Situational Writers Block
I’ve reached an odd dilemma in my writing.
On the one hand, I keep coming up with ideas for the “middle” part of my book. The more I let my mind wonder the clearer I see each character’s actions, and understand their individual struggles and motivations, during the events that cause all of their lives to transition into conflict. I see all of it, and I am anxious (and a little afraid) to write it.
However… I am also stuck. There is at least one more chapter I need to write, one that is primarily for character building and identifying, before I can even begin to set everything in motion.
I have read countless articles about writing a book, and something they all suggested was to “write the parts you want to write, and then worry about connecting them later.” This seems like an excellent idea to me, almost genius in it’s simplicity, but there’s only one problem: my obsessive need to do everything in order is preventing me from even attempting this. It seems I can’t move forward in the story unless *I* know what happens before, and this is probably because I’m not really working with an outline. I have the general ideas of where I want the story to go, but that’s it – otherwise I let the writing take me where it wants to while I just cling along for the ride. Many of the same guides that suggested I write out of order would also scold me for not working with an outline.
And, damnit, I’m still in conflict over my character’s names. I’m considering changing Ethan to Colin and Emma to either Wendy, Phoebe, Mackenzie… or some others that I can’t quite remember at the moment, because I’m never able to write them down as I think of them.
As many sims as I’ve had over the years while playing Sims 1 and 2, you’d think that something as simple as a name would be an easy task for me. It can’t really be that different, can it?
I have (at last count) about eleven works in progress: some idea will come to me and I’ll just write it down, having no attachment to the actual events or the specific words that I use, just using every amount of energy I have to make my fingers move fast enough so that everything floating around in my head is out on paper before I muddle things up and lose that specific train of words that started the whole process. And, usually those paragraphs will stay that way until I’m feeling rather inspired and I revisit them and realize how short they are, how vague, how awfully shitty they seem in hindsight. So I think up character names, backstories, general outlines that could, potentially, involve both the character I have just created (that seems, in part, wholly unconnected to the paragraph that inspired them) and the string of words that basically created the whole story. So then, when I get to that scene in my story, I have no problem tweaking it or erasing huge chunks of text because the story leading up to that moment no longer exists the way that it did if that moment were the whole story.
And, I suppose this is a very convoluted way of saying you should just write what you need to write and, if it helps, think of these later scenes as separate from your general story, allowing you to both get them out of your head and continue with your need to write in order. You might (or might not) realize it, but almost every single story is a handful of moments strung together by minute details. Those moments are the parts of the text that are beautifully described, almost always a dissertation on an hour – or even minutes – of time. Because the author probably thought of that moment first and all the story leading up to that moment was just their interpretation of how that moment could logically come about.
I wouldn’t fret so much. I spent about a week staring down one of my novels in complete anger and disgust because it wasn’t fun to write anymore. I was trying to force myself to write according to the outline I had come up with and it was if my characters were saying “Don’t force this on us!,” as if even they didn’t believe they should have to be explained in novel-form. So I started another story and it’s flowing along and all these adjectives are flying out of my fingers and I realized that giving up (for the time being) on this first story wasn’t a form of failure, it was the exact solution I needed to not give myself a headache and go on a writer’s strike just because I didn’t want to write a certain scene in a certain way.
I think guide books are only good for telling you how to write a specific form of literature (like a screenplay or a sonnet). If your story is good enough, people will mold it into “the rules” anyway, no matter how it progresses or how you set about writing it.