Today must be Writer's Block day. I found a few blog entries in common today, and it sent me thinking about whatever my experiences have been with 'writer's block'.
Every time I hit the wall, it is because I have either disengaged myself
from my story, focused too tightly on useless details, I'm looking too far
down the story line, or I've lost sight of the character motivations.
Disengaged
On disengaged days, I do not mean that I have dumped a girlfriend. I mean that I am too distracted by the call of life's necessities. I'm worried about money, marketing, or whatever else is in my inbox. To get re-engaged I unplug, retreat, and put myself directly into the story almost as another character re-observing the scene. I find the thread of what brought my characters here and follow it again.
Details
The first draft of a story is not where you need to agonize over the color of a character's socks, or whether they are left or right-handed. If it is important to the story, it can always be decided later and woven back into the themes. If it is NOT important to the story, don't spend time on it in the first place. It is more vital that you can tell the main story from beginning to end in the first telling. If you need more nooks and crannies, those can be added later. Stay on track and leave those interesting details for a later revision.
Farsighted
If you are concerned about how to get from the scene you're writing to a future scene, it can really start to mess with your circuitry. If I have no idea how to get from point M to point W in my plot, then I didn't really do a good job of planning the plot, did I? There are at least two roads to travel here – either sit down and replot where you're going, or jump to the future scene and get it out of your sysem. You can always mash out the differences in the details later. Nobody said you had to write your chapters in order now, did they?
Motivations
I've read stories from younger writers where the characters seem to drift through the action, as if part of a movie rather than from a felt need to do something. I call these character actions 'zombie tricks'. If your character is riffling through drawers, loading a weapon, or jumping into a vehicle and a reader can't know 'why' from the text, then she's just a zombie going through the motions of whatever the plot calls for. This is another case where the author needs to re-engage with the story.
Or that's my two bits. What does writers block mean to you? How do you get stuck? What is your road out?
