E.M. Prazeman
I look at writer's block as one of two things going on (at least for me.) All I have to do to start writing again is figure out why I've stopped.
1. I've written myself into a corner or made a wrong turn in the plot, and now the story is dull, or just feels wrong.
I have to go back and figure out at what turning point I messed up an otherwise good story, scrap it, and start over from there with my ultimate goal in mind, which is to amp up the tension, the stakes, and make the ending even more punchy. I'm a big chicken when it comes to deleting large blocks of text, so I do save those in a separate file, but never in over twenty years of writing have I gone back and reused those, so I really should just delete them and forget about them.
2. I don't want to write the next part because it's hard for some reason.
Maybe it hits too close to home and I'm trying to weasel out of what seems like a statement. For example, a character may have been raped by our current cultural standards, but may not feel victimized or traumatized and I feel like I'm belittling the experience of rape victims. Or maybe it's very complicated or too dependent on other factors in the book that I haven't worked out yet, and I don't want to go through the effort of mapping everything out.
The solution is to sit down and just do it, and to remember that once it's written, it isn't set in stone. I can make adjustments or even jettison the whole section and rewrite it if I find a way to approach the scene differently. This is what I think of when people talk about writing courageously. You have to let yourself make mistakes to write. And sometimes those 'mistakes' turn out to be the most powerful sections of the book when you go back to revise the rough draft.
1. I've written myself into a corner or made a wrong turn in the plot, and now the story is dull, or just feels wrong.
I have to go back and figure out at what turning point I messed up an otherwise good story, scrap it, and start over from there with my ultimate goal in mind, which is to amp up the tension, the stakes, and make the ending even more punchy. I'm a big chicken when it comes to deleting large blocks of text, so I do save those in a separate file, but never in over twenty years of writing have I gone back and reused those, so I really should just delete them and forget about them.
2. I don't want to write the next part because it's hard for some reason.
Maybe it hits too close to home and I'm trying to weasel out of what seems like a statement. For example, a character may have been raped by our current cultural standards, but may not feel victimized or traumatized and I feel like I'm belittling the experience of rape victims. Or maybe it's very complicated or too dependent on other factors in the book that I haven't worked out yet, and I don't want to go through the effort of mapping everything out.
The solution is to sit down and just do it, and to remember that once it's written, it isn't set in stone. I can make adjustments or even jettison the whole section and rewrite it if I find a way to approach the scene differently. This is what I think of when people talk about writing courageously. You have to let yourself make mistakes to write. And sometimes those 'mistakes' turn out to be the most powerful sections of the book when you go back to revise the rough draft.
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