Arnold Eigger's Blog: Chernaya Bay Chronicles

Return to Chernaya Bay
Personally I don't believe in writer's block. I think there is definitely a challenge in keeping the flow of inspiration and this is a big difference to me. It is the half full versus the half empty glass. There are tricks to stall the lack of inspiration and all you have to do is to move on onto a topic that inspires you more, use a new angle to tell your story, invent a new channel to deliver a flow of inspiration. Use freedom to jump obstacles and travel to a different part of your story. This is why having an outline is important because it gives you options on how to write your story. Nothing is stopping you from writing the end of your book first or right in the middle and then return to the beginning. Having to follow a chronology of events is a cliché. You are free to decide when it is time to get away from boredom, where you need to spice up your story, when you need to bring in new perspectives with new characters. Writing is a long distance runner effort and it can become tedious and tiresome. You need to keep it fun, exciting and unpredictable in a way that it can surprise you and help you being creative. Never forget that you are the master plan and that you make the decisions. Having a block is more about not seeing that you have plenty of options in front of you and the freedom is yours to grab. Impose discipline but enjoy the freedom you have to foster your creativity.

I was inquiring about audiobooks a few days ago and I read quite a few articles about the subject.
I was surprised to learn that the number of sales are rapidly progressing and that there is now a new market to address. Being a musician myself, I realized I have all the equipment and technical knowledge to produce one myself. I estimate that it should take me less than twenty hours of recording and editing to complete this project. This is a new challenge that I consider, find appealing and creative. Considering that my book "Return to Chernaya Bay" was released a few month ago, I am still building my promotional outreach and I think that adding an audiobook feature to it would represent an asset and could generate more sales and meet this new market demand.

I have used this technique to write at least one chapter from Return to Chernaya Bay but I am sure it also contributed to many other aspects of my writing in the book. In the chapter 17, titled "Nightmare", I used it and it really helped me create a character development and it brought a spontaneous and yet in depth insight about one of my main characters with the introduction of secondary characters.
I like the effect of having something totally out of nowhere triggering a whole creating process. One phrase, one idea, one question, one image can develop and inspire a chapter and take your story to an unexpected direction. I really believe it should be used and it can refresh your writing approach. For this chapter the prompt selected was implying to finish the writing piece with "What is going to happen to them?"