Indie Life: Writer's Block

Welcome to Indie Life. This is a monthly blog hop (every second Wednesday of the month) where the participants blog on anything and everything related to self-publishing. Join us!

Last week, I was struggling with writer's block. I was a quarter of the way into my latest novel's first draft when I hit a wall. I was writing a scene and something was wrong. But I didn't know what. I knew the scene's setting, I knew the characters that had to be there, and I knew what the scene had to be about. It was all there. But the scene was dead. I tried to push through it. I tried polishing the scene. But nothing worked.

So I sat down with a sheaf of notebook paper and a pen. I wrote out questions, asking myself what the scene was about. Not what happened in the scene, but what the scene did for the book. I answered that the scene was supposed to be an echo of two of the novel's themes--confession and forgiveness. And while the scene did echo those themes, it wasn't a quiet echo. It was loud and bombastic. Instead of the ethereal whisper of a violin, it was the subwoofer boom of a percussion backbeat. Strong enough that it was distracting from the plot and themes instead of underlining them.

Then, I asked myself what the scene was supposed to do for the characters. It was supposed to deepen a minor characters, which it did by exposing one of his flaws. But the failing I showed was more of an as-a-writer-I-know-this-character-is-supposed-to-be-flawed-and-I'm-trying-to-make-him-flawed-but-not-too-flawed. And that was the problem, the flaw was half-hearted. It was a speck of lint on black velvet, not a tear ripping through the velvet and the silk lining. I needed a real flaw, a surprise to the reader. I needed to make the reader catch his breath, but still like the character. A much harder task.

Once I realized what function the scene had for the characters and themes, I brainstormed fixes. I realized that what needed to happen was the exact opposite of what I'd written. So I took the scene back to the bones and rewrote it. The words flowed across the page. The scene practically wrote itself. Writer's block was over.

If you're struggling with a scene or facing writer's block, think about the scene/chapter/plot twist's function. Think about the purposes it's serving in terms of advancing plot/character development/themes and ask yourself if those things are all working together in the scene. If not, ask yourself how it's failing those purposes. Once you understand what's wrong, then you can fix it.

So maybe writer's block isn't always a bad thing. Maybe it's just an early warning system, a red light flashing "Hey, dummy, this doesn't work." That's what I'm telling myself.

Other Brave Indie Lifers...

1.	Susan Kaye Quinn, Author	2.	Steena Holmes
3.	Claudia Lefeve	4.	Author Laura Diamond Lucid Dreamer
5.	ali cross	6.	Katie Klein
7.	Larry Kollar	8.	Faith McKay
9.	Civil War Horror	10.	Ansha Kotyk
11.	Terri J. Haynes	12.	The Open Vein, E.J. Wesley
13.	Secondhand Shoes, A Novel	14.	Eclectic
15.	Lisa M. Buske	16.	Sandra Ulbrich Almazan
17.	J.R. Pearse Nelson	18.	Melissa Pearl
19.	Cherie Reich	20.	PK HREZO
21.	Victoria Escobar	22.	J.L. Campbell
23.	K. A. Last	24.	The Murphey Saga
25.	Tyrean's Writing Spot	26.	Suzy Turner
27.	Laura Pauling	28.	C.M. Brown
29.	Stephen Tremp	30.	Jennifer Writes Things Sometimes
31.	Capri Montgomery	32.	Indiscriminate Writes
33.	C. M. Keller, Screwing Up Time	34.	RaShelle Workman
35.	J.J. Bonds	36.	Why I love the indie life
37.	A First Look at Indie Life	38.	Mary Pax
39.	Notes from the Jovian frontier	40.	L.E. Waters~Fantasy Prone
41.	The Indie Children's Authors Connection	42.	Christian Superheroes
43.	Ellie Garratt	44.	Write Me, Kaye Draper
45.	Can You Make a Living Writing? (Author Nikki Jefford)	46.	Michelle Isenhoff
47.	Catherine Stine's Idea City	48.	The Lina Lamont Fan Club
49.	Donna Hosie	50.	Rinelle Grey
51.	Word by Word	52.	Riann Colton
53.	Strange Pegs	54.	Rachel Morgan
55.	sarabeth burke	56.	Writing, the Universe and Everything Writing
57.	J.L. Weil	58.	Meetings with My Muse
59.	Planet Pailly: Where Science Meets Fiction	60.	Janeal Falor
61.	Michael Pierce

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Paris, My Cure for Writer's Block

As you know, I recently had the vacation of a lifetime—my husband and I went to Paris. (If you want to read more about it, click here, here, here, and here.) But now, it’s time to get back to the grindstone. So I’m editing again. (A fan recently asked when book three was coming out—he has another round of intense physical therapy coming up in the fall and wants the book as a distraction from the pain. Yes, Adam, I hope to have the book out in the fall.)

But it this round of edits, I’m doing something different. Something I’ve never done before. I’m working on two books at once. While I’m editing book three, I’m working on a new literary fiction. Two vastly different books and genres. When I first thought about doing it, I was nervous because I was afraid the books would influence each other—that the voices would bleed into each other and I’d end up with a romantic comedy/literary fiction and a literary/action adventure—not your typical cross-genre novels.

But I tried to write the lit fic anyway. (The story has been in my head for years.) It was horrible. The narrative was flat. I rewrote the first 2,000 words over and over. But they were still deader than dead. I told myself that it was because I couldn’t write two books at the same time.

I considered scrapping the book. But when a story’s been in your head for years, it doesn’t go away. I put the decision on hold when we went to Paris. And when we came back, I opened the document—I was going to rewrite those two thousand words one more time. So I did. And the two thousand words of straw changed to silver (not gold—that takes several revisions).

So the morale of the story: when you have writer’s block, take a trip to Paris. For my next book, I already feel writer’s block coming on. To cure it, I think I’ll need a trip to Venice or Florence. Or maybe both. That’s my cure and I’m sticking to it. 

Here's a photo of my husband and me in the gardens at Versailles.

Don't forget about the book swag giveaway. I still need some more reviews.
Here's a link to Screwing Up Time's Amazon page. And here's one for Screwing Up Babylon.