getting stuck

For a long time, I used to give the advice that if you are stuck in the middle of a book, unsure what happens next, you should continue to push through and just get it finished. I still think is mostly good advice for beginning writers. Not because it will produce a really great novel, though. Mostly because it is what you need to do to get experience in writing a whole, completed novel. Your next one will go better because your brain will be used to thinking early on how to set things up and you will actually start reading differently because of your desperation. Actually, your tenth novel will probably be a whole lot better. But you don't want to hear that, I know.

For me lately, say in the last three years, I have found that when I get stuck on a novel, it is time to put it aside and work on something else. I don't actually know if I am going to figure out how to finish writing that novel, but I have faith that I will. I just don't know how to do it yet, and I trust in my subconscious to start gathering the necessary information to figure it out, while I am unaware of what it is doing, and then suddenly a couple of years later, I will sit down at the computer, working on something else, and I'll feel this rush of inspiration and go back and work on that novel I had put aside.

But if you've never finished writing a novel, I don't know how to describe the difference between the terrifying feeling of not being sure if what you are writing is going to be any good and the terrifying feeling of emptiness because you're not ready to write this book yet. Does that make any sense? I suppose there are other terrifying feelings about being a writer, too. There's the terrifying feeling of writing a second book after a first one has been successful. Or writing a book after the last one has been unsuccessful. Lots of terror.

Of course, it's also true that everyone has to find their own way to getting their novel finished and no one can tell you what that way is. It may be that you need to go on vacation to Mexico with all your writer friends and spend 24/7 thinking, eating, breathing, pooling your book, and you'll find your way to the end. But for me, I write the book that keeps me up at night, planning the next section, figuring out who is going to be named what, and how they are going to meet, and what they are going to say to each other. If the book I think I'm supposed to write isn't doing that, it isn't the right book.