Writing Through It

We started the year getting you started on your novel, and have spent recent weeks trying to keep you going despite the many inner demons that try to stop you.
Sometimes you hit a wall and suspect that the reason is a bad choice you made several chapters back. You can even see where the story would be if you hadn’t added that one plot element. This is devastating to the confidence. But, in my opinion, when you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. If you know what your story ought to be at this point, go on from there as if it has gone the right way all along. Yes, that leaves you with a big hole you will have to fill in later, but you’re no longer stuck. At the end you’ll look back and realize you have two different timelines in your story. Go back and make everything fit the new timeline and let the original one die.
I’ve gotten stuck on occasion because I get bored with my characters. They’re not doing anything interesting and I start to tell myself it’s their fault. Actually, if they’re boring it’s probably because I haven’t figured out what they really want. I’ve got to find the conflict that will push them into real action. And if I wrote pages and pages of doing boring things at least I learned more about them. Once I know what these people are really about, I’ll find their real central conflict. Then I need the courage to cut all those boring pages and get right to the stuff that matters.
Lack of confidence can cause writer’s block all by itself. You start imagining all the reasons some critic will say your story is bad, and that keeps you from making any decision. But trust me, the ideas you come up with are never as bad as your fear makes you believe. So drive on thru your first draft, knowing you can fix whatever’s flawed in the rewrite.
Sometimes it’s not the story, but the words. You can be blocked because you can’t find exactly the right word. Not that there’s anything wrong with spending a day fretting over one sentence. But you should have a limit. Maybe after three or four days you should just use the wrong word, or just write [verb] in the right place, and move on. In the flow of the rewrite the right word will probably appear.
Occasionally you might have a great story in your head, but when you start to put it into words looks kinda stupid. Now this COULD actually be your better instincts telling you there’s a problem with your idea. Sometimes just abandoning a novel and starting over is the right thing. Just don’t quit too fast. Maybe part of your cool idea is worth saving. Maybe the idea is genuinely cool and the problem is in your execution. Try writing a synopsis of what you have to that point. This step back can help you see how it fits together. Or, try writing part of your story from a different character's point of view. A different viewpoint can sometimes unstick you.
One more thing: writers can cruise thru that first draft and get bogged down in the rewrite. If you’re like me – I push quickly thru the first draft planning to fix it all in the rewrites – you have to accept that there’s no way to make the process go faster. You need to look at your words from different angles. And consider getting feedback from other writers. They may see structural weaknesses invisible to you.

In other words, getting stuck during revisions is not writer’s block. It’s part of the natural process of trying to improve your writing. You might end up rewriting whole sections from scratch. That’s okay. It’s often faster than trying to improve the words you’ve already put together. Just keep your eyes on the prize – getting to the end of that great manuscript!