Jeffrey R. DeRego
There isn't any such thing as writer's block. I power through what I can. If I am struggling with a story I usually have another story that I can work on for a while in place of the one where I have reached an impasse. If that doesn't work, I walk away for a while, read, play guitar (badly...) then go back to it.
When I was working almost exclusively on Union Dues stories I had other ideas for other stories outside of that set that I wanted to capture so I wrote story fragments, log lines, and synopsis down whenever I was looking for the right way to get over the hump in a Union Dues story. That led to all of the Pleasant Hollow stories, the Burden of Bushido stories, and all of the miscellaneous science fiction shorts I've written and published.
When I find myself at an impasse it is usually because i do not have the time to write into and around and over the problem. That is why my output is so low when I have full time work. It is very hard to serve two masters, and creative writing requires hours and hours and hours to do well. If you don't have the time to submerge in the story then it makes for very slow creation.
When I was working almost exclusively on Union Dues stories I had other ideas for other stories outside of that set that I wanted to capture so I wrote story fragments, log lines, and synopsis down whenever I was looking for the right way to get over the hump in a Union Dues story. That led to all of the Pleasant Hollow stories, the Burden of Bushido stories, and all of the miscellaneous science fiction shorts I've written and published.
When I find myself at an impasse it is usually because i do not have the time to write into and around and over the problem. That is why my output is so low when I have full time work. It is very hard to serve two masters, and creative writing requires hours and hours and hours to do well. If you don't have the time to submerge in the story then it makes for very slow creation.
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