On Overcoming My Writer's Block...

So I finally finished FrankenDom's Monster and released it 7 years to the day after I released FrankenDom. I'm kind of known for my epic episodes of writer's block--in fact, my blog is titled One Writer's Block Party--but I took it to new heights with Monster.

The original FrankenDom took me only 7 weeks to write, from inception of the idea to putting it up for sale, and it was about 10,000 words longer than the sequel. I'd set up Monster pretty well, and I was confident I'd be able to have it up within a year, at most. And I did start writing it almost right away, because the ideas were already percolating in my mind.

Then I ran into a problem--the book demanded a true external plot to complete the main protagonist's arc. To say plotting has never been my strong point would be a massive understatement, so of course I went straight for my favorite parts, the hero's damaged emotions and the healing power of kink. But I kept writing in circles, never able to move the story forward. I changed POV, I started in different places, and tried everything I could to get the story moving. I wrote and wrote and wrote, for YEARS, and eventually I made it to 60,000 words. But the story was boring because it was going nowhere--BECAUSE I COULDN'T PLOT MY WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG.

But this summer, a friend who's a very good plotter recommended a craft book, Save the Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody, and my writing life was forever changed. It taught me the 15 essential plot points for a successful novel, and compared them to books I'd read and movies I'd seen, and it all finally started to make sense. I read the book in less than 2 hours, and then sat down with that list of 15 plot points and plugged in all the plot elements for Monster I'd had jumbled in my head for literally YEARS...and suddenly I had a coherent rough outline of my plot.

I literally cried. And laughed, because it just seemed too easy. (And it WAS too easy, because my muse is a sadistic bastard.) But that list of 15 plot points helped me start the book over again--and yes, I started all over from the beginning. I only managed to save 3 scenes (less than 5,000 words) from my first 60k partial draft. I actually kept a Cut Stuff document, saving all the large swaths of text I cut in case I wanted to pull them back in later, and that document wound up being 93,000 words, because many times I had to write scenes 2-3 times before I got them right.

But every time I got stuck and started writing in circles, I'd consult that list of plot points and go, "Aha! That's what I'm supposed to be doing with that scene, and this is where I'm going next!" And I'd be unblocked almost immediately.

And in just a few months, the book was finished. Finally. And I love it so much, and it's SO much better than the original draft, I can't even begin to tell you.

So that's the secret of how FrankenDom's Monster finally got written--I learned to plot. If you're a writer and you're having difficulty with plotting and/or writer's block, I'd HIGHLY recommend you buy Save the Cat Writes A Novel. It rescued me from a seven-year block, and now I'll never write a book without plotting it again.