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This is number 133 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“HOW DO YOU HANDLE writer’s block? I just don’t have any ideas!”
False!
You have ideas. It’s part of being alive. So why can’t you just sit down and write them?
Contrary to popular opinion, I suffer from writer’s block on occasion. I have nearly a dozen partially drafted novels that I’ve set aside because I simply couldn’t continue them at the moment.
They include:
Promethien, Child of Earth: a sequel to The Props Master series (Devon Layne)
A Place Among Peers: a sequel to A Place at the Table (Nathan Everett)
Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain: a sequel to Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain (DL)
Lay of the Land: a fourth volume in the Wonders of My World series (DL)
Immortal Eternal: a novel that explores what happens when people stop dying (NE)
Double Down: a novel about playing Blackjack in the 1980s-90s (DL)
Immortality: a novel about a guy who is given a drug that will extend his healthy life indefinitely, but doesn’t restore his youth (NE)
And several others that just landed in my ‘idea file,’ like Silicon Slum, The Burgundy Chamber, Heart & Soul, Means Motive & Opportunity, Pussy Pirates 2, Switching Places, Take My Wife, A Vampire’s Tale, and What Happens in Vegas. Ideas, ideas, and more ideas.
But I haven’t finished them because somewhere along the line, I got writer’s block. I didn’t know where to take the story next.
I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) For Mayhem or Madness in 2020, as we were all experiencing the madness of COVID 19. I’d started a first draft as early as 2013, but I couldn’t focus on the story as I began my solo journey as a full time RVer. I had too many other things to focus on. So, I went back to it as I sat in my trailer, waiting to be released from the camp in Phar, Texas so I could finally go back north.
The story had been brewing in the back of my head for seven years. I knew what it was, how it began, and where it would end. It would come between For Money or Mayhem and For Blood or Money—another mystery for cyber detective Dag Hamar.
As I reached the end of the story, I glanced at my word count and discovered the entire manuscript was only about 40,000 words. To put that in perspective, most of my books are between 80,000 and 250,000 words. Even the popular November noveling challenge was for 50,000 words. This was scarcely enough to be a novella.
But I couldn’t think of anything else to write in it. Blank. And then I realized, it was finished!
I ended up publishing it as a novella rather than a full-length novel in September 2020 with less than 40,000. For Mayhem or Madness eBook is available on ZBookStore.
So, what do you do when you are suddenly faced with writer’s block? There are literally hundreds of suggestions available on the internet for breaking writer’s block. One popular method is to use a writing prompt. If you search for this on-line you will find several sources.
Let’s say, for example, that you are stuck with your main character facing a tough decision. You tune in for a writing prompt and receive, “Describe the scent of a blooming flower in springtime.” It’s the middle of winter in your story. Your character has never mentioned a flower in your entire story. Yet here you are asked to describe the scent.
You start thinking about the type of person your MC is. What would cause her to notice the scent of a flower? What would the setting be? When was she there? How long ago is this memory? What caused her to happen to think of that at just this moment? As you jot down your thoughts on the experience, it becomes clear to you that the only way the MC could possibly choose between the alternatives is X. You progress from writing about the scent of a flower to the outcome of her decision.
I know of people who use the same method in real life, even more now that AI is so willing to give people ideas out of context.
Another way to break the blockage is simply to consider the five senses and write about what the MC is experiencing at that moment through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
In my own experience, I more frequently find writer’s block in the form of a kind of logjam of ideas rather than a lack of ideas. This is more literally a blockage than an emptiness. What causes this kind of idea logjam?
First, you may have been overstimulated. You went out with friends. You read an interesting story. You saw a movie. You were just out driving your car when characters started talking (my favorite). Whatever the stimulation, you just have all these ideas built up and can’t choose among them.
Second, you may have become inspired. While that sounds like a good thing, authors often find they have been inspired to write something completely different than what they were working on. It’s the shiny object syndrome. They were working on one thing when they were suddenly inspired by a song they heard on the radio that reminded them of a person they met on a train who told them about their life, and now they simply have to write about that.
Third, you may have lost sight of the MC’s main goal in the story. Since the goal is not visible, there are dozens of paths stretching out before the MC and you can’t tell which one you should follow. They all look equally exciting (or equally boring).
When faced with this kind of logjam, the solution is to make a decision. Even if you make the wrong decision, you will be moving. You may need to revisit the decision later and see that you needed to take a different path, but that is what is so wonderful about writing: the story you wrote is not immutable. Authors somehow get into the mindset that they have to do it right or perfectly the first time out. As I indicated in a previous post, this is influenced by the advent of computer typing programs that make the first draft ‘look’ like publishable copy.
“Quod scripsi, scripsi.” What I have written, I have written. (John 19:22)
Wrong! What I have written is editable. It may come as a shock to some authors, but they are not transcribing the word of God in their novel. If you make the wrong decision then go back and change it later. Anything you write can be changed.
The important thing at this stage is to pick one (an idea)—even if totally unrelated—and write it.
This is also why many November novelists end up writing smut where it is totally inappropriate for their book. Not only is it an easy way to pad the word-count, but it is a way of breaking the logjam so words begin to flow again. The smut may be inappropriate for your children’s book, but you can (and should) edit it out later.
Speaking of editing, that’s next. Assuming you make it through to the end of your novel’s first draft, “It ain’t over till…”
This is number 132 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE MOST TERRIFYING THING in the world is facing an empty page. At least if you’re an author. You can do all the planning, plotting, putting in snacks and caffeinated beverages, talking up what you are going to write, but ultimately, you have to sit down and face the empty page.
The problem of the tabula rasa, or clean slate, has been around since at least Aristotle’s time. It’s philosophical meaning is that the human mind is born blank and all thoughts originate after birth, based on experience. In some religious philosophies, our purpose is to erase the slate of our minds in order to reach a state of oneness with the universe.
Please don’t argue with me about either of those points. I’m not religious and I’m not a philosopher. If I have time to stare at my navel and contemplate the mysteries of the universe, I’m using it to stare at an empty page and try to figure out the words to put on it. That’s the only tabula rasa I’m concerned with.
As a writer, and author of some 75 fiction titles, I am intimately familiar with the concept of facing an empty page. It’s hard. When preparing for November Noveling Month, I plan out much of what I intend to put in my new novel. But at midnight on Halloween, I sit in front of the computer thinking about the daunting task of writing 50,000 words in the coming month, I listen to the sudden quiet that comes over the group of people I’ve chosen to launch the month with, and I stare at a blank page trying to figure out how to begin. (BTW, I'm currently over 48,000 words or fourteen chapters into my current NoNoMo project after 15 days.)
This became such a problem a few years ago that I began a new process during my prep month that would help me when we counted down to midnight. I memorized my opening line. I did it without writing it down. I would come up with a launch point and then silently repeat it over and over until I had it memorized. Then I would repeat it every day until it was time to start writing.
“Indiana wasn’t heaven, but she lived next door.”
“I was slow to learn to talk.”
“Hi! I’m Bob and I’ll be your demon tonight.”
“Cornfields. Wheat fields. Bean fields. Hay fields. And fields of crops I couldn’t identify. Miles and miles of fields.”
“High school was a bust as far as I was concerned.”
“Art Something. That’s me. Art. People point at me and say, “That’s Art Something.” Nobody knows my last name, I guess. Nobody cares. But Art is the important part. Art is my name. Art is my life.”
I memorized those lines until I had each down so it flowed smoothly. Then on Halloween night at the stroke of midnight, I just dumped that line out onto the page and kept going.
It’s referred to as ‘breaking the page.’
Writing is not the only profession or avocation in which the creator faces a blank page. Artists often have a similar response to a blank canvas. In fact, a favored technique for breaking the page is to do a number of quick sketches before turning to the actual canvas or drawing paper. These warmup sketches can be done on cheap paper stock, like newsprint, and are usually very large, allowing the artist to really limber up.
I did my graduate work in theatrical design. One of the aspects that is less fun than just ‘being creative’ is the necessity of creating technical drawings. Talk about a big sheet of blank paper! Taping a $5.00 sheet of vellum to your drafting table and setting a T-square on it is intimidating. We were taught to first draw a border on the paper and to create the info box in the lower righthand corner. Having done that, we no longer had a blank sheet of vellum. The page had been broken and we could continue to draft the plans for the scenery or a prop.
Do you recall your schooling days? Some of us are either too far removed or simply didn’t pay enough attention to remember much of them. I was always amused by the teacher’s instructions at the beginning of a test. “Write your name at the top of the page!” Like she had to remind people to identify their work! And perhaps she did, because there was always one paper ‘left to be claimed’ because there was no name on it. But the simple act of writing your name at the top of the page broke the white space. It was then yours.
All of these techniques can be applied to the tabula rasa before you start writing. I understand that many people—especially younger people—do not handwrite anything. They may not be able to get started on their book by writing notes. Printing doesn’t flow with the mind as smoothly as cursive writing, and that is an art that is all but lost. The important thing is to find a way to detach yourself from assuming your first draft has to be your final, finished, and printable draft.
Now that we are writing, what happens when you reach a point in your manuscript where the words just don’t come out anymore? Next week, we’ll talk about ‘The Logjam.’
This is number 131 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“MY PLOT has more holes than Swiss cheese!” said many a new author—and often seasoned authors as well.
Plots are hard. Sitting down to make a point-by-point list of how the plot will develop can seem a daunting task at best. So much so, that when Chris Baty started the now-defunct National Novel Writing Month, he wrote a book called No Plot, No Problem to encourage people to take up the challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in a month.
Chris had a good idea, and thousands of writers followed it over the next twenty-five years. But the title doesn’t really say it all. Many writers got bogged down in a morass of disconnected thoughts, actions without motivation, and emergency sex scenes in order to pad out the word count. Much like the authors on SOL!
In the case of at least half the authors, that’s not so. I jest.
In my case, it’s not true of at least half my stories.
I’ve been consulting on people’s writing for many years. There are a few writers I’ve helped to bigger and better things. Like becoming an accountant.
For several years, I chaired a category of the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association Annual Literary Competition. The poor people in the short non-fiction (memoir) category were exposed to my critique. I read hundreds of essays about things that happened in the authors’ lives.
The problem I saw with most is what I called anecdotalism. I think I just coined that term. In general, the ten-page essay amounted to telling about an amusing incident—or a life-changing event—in the person’s life. And that was it. They were the type of stories you might tell the coffee klatch on Friday afternoon, but they really held no interest beyond that. Why?
Because they had no point!
When authors approach me with a book about their lives, I always ask, “What’s the point?”
For many people—and this is for novelists as well as memoirists—the point is simply to leave a legacy behind for their descendants to know their grandmother a little better. That’s fine, but there is no real reason to have that book cluttering up the online bookstores or to be disappointed in its sales.
In the same way, having a great character or set of characters and tossing conflicts at them in order to inspire action isn’t quite enough to make a book. What’s the point?
I’m personally not a fan of game-based novels and movies: Halo, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed, and Tomb Raider to name a few. They often seem to be determined by the throw of a die, albeit a 20-sided one. The author doesn’t have a clear path for the story, or even to know how long her merry band of adventurers will be on the road.
However, one thing that most games have is an objective. There’s a point to playing. Discover a new land, slay the dragon, get the treasure, become the king, etc.
All I’m saying is there should be a point to your novel. A goal. What is it?
So, your simplest plot for the story is to ask yourself, “What is the goal?” When you can answer that, you have a plot. Conflict comes in the way of things that will prevent the MC (main character) from achieving the goal. Action will come in the way the MC overcomes conflict. Overcoming all the conflicts will lead to the achievement of the goal, and thus to the end of the plot.
What’s the point? No matter how long your story is, whether a contest entry or even shorter work, or if it is an epic fantasy, you can keep it moving by sticking to the point—or at least returning to it.
In RPG (role play gaming) there are often side quests—basically opportunities to chase after squirrels. Take them. They make the story more interesting. But always come back to the main goal.
I’m big on character development, as you have seen from previous posts. One of the comments I hear most often in November—we still write novels in November even though NaNoWriMo is no more—is that the characters took over and the author can’t get them on track.
Okay. They’re off on a side quest. Eventually, though, they have to slay the dragon. That’s the point. If they spend fifty years as a drunkard in a tavern in Genovia, they still are going to have to face the damn dragon. If they won’t go out to get him, he’ll come there.
That doesn’t mean the intended two have to get married. They might have to put up with a less suitable pairing—Think Harry and Ginny and Hermione and Ron. That’s characters when they drive things. But they still have to defeat the Death Eaters.
So, characters drive action, action drives plot. You get action by creating conflict. Easy-peasy, right?
Since everything revolves around character, you should have a variety of them. Each should be just as well developed as the others. One of the faults new writers trip over is only having one interesting character in their story. The rest are cardboard cutouts the MC is supposed to interact with. That makes things kind of boring. All the MC has to do is walk up to the cardboard cutout and push it over.
When the villain is as well developed as the hero, there is potential for real conflict that is not a pushover. When ancillary characters are well-developed, there is opportunity for love, betrayal, hurt, distrust, and friendship. The MC isn’t going to go down the street holding hands with a cardboard cutout, nor is she going to fall into bed with one.
Each character should have his or her own distinct voice, too. It is hard on the reader if they all sound the same. Just remember that with all these characters in mind, you won’t bring them into conflict unless you have the goal in mind.
Many authors say there is nothing more intimidating than a blank page. Next week we’ll talk about Facing Pages.
This is number 130 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE CAMERAS ARE ROLLING. The characters are in position. And what is the next thing the director says?
“Action!”
Then a car explodes or something. An actor jumps from one building to another. Shots are fired. Punches are thrown in a Kung Fu fight. Or maybe the opening credits roll over a star scape that morphs into the pattern on a coffee cup.
That last one is less and less likely. I watched a movie online a few nights ago and the opening credits didn’t begin until almost twenty minutes into the movie. Prior to that was a twenty-minute action scene setting up the lead character. What it really did was expose what kind of person the main character was.
And that is the kind of action we are looking for. Character drives the action. So, action needs to expose and be consistent with the characteristics of the person you are writing about. If you have imagined a character who is nearsighted, you can’t suddenly have him spotting a threat coming toward him from a number of yards away. That isn’t consistent with his capability.
Even if a normal person who is in leg braces suddenly starts outrunning all the bullies chasing him, he has to have something in his character that enables the transformation. Run, Forrest, run!
If you have done a good job of creating your character—even if only in your mind, but I advise writing it down—you need to put challenges in front of her that will show her strengths and weaknesses. Action is at the intersection of conflict and character. Hence, you need to discover what the conflict is. Or, since you are the author, create the conflict that forces the character into action.
In Devon Layne’s The Rock, Book #5 of the Living Next Door to Heaven series, Brian is called upon to defend Hannah against a meth-enhanced former boyfriend. Brian was originally presented in Book #1 as a weak shrimp, always being defended and protected by his bigger and stronger friends. But over the course of the next three books, he is in constant training from Whitney and has shown himself as able to ‘take a hit.’
Still, his instinct is not to fight if he can help it. He takes two hits and narrowly escapes a knife gash to his head. In the next instant, his training kicks in and he breaks the attacker’s arm, neuters him with a kick, and bursts his appendix with a hit to the stomach. Within his capability and consistent with his character? Absolutely.
However, when Whitney gets him to relate the event, replaying each step, she demands, “Why didn’t you kill him?”
Killing the attacker would not have been consistent with Brian’s character. In the long run, he is not the killer that future Marine Whitney is. But his actions in subduing the attacker are completely consistent with his character. He will protect those he loves at all costs.
The Rock, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series are available as eBooks from ZBookStore.
In my opinion, a typical flaw in novels is spending too much effort to explain why a character is the way he is. That’s often very informative. Brian is picked on and bullied in school because he is small. But he is intensely loyal to his friends—especially Heaven—and he can’t help but attempt to rescue her when she is attacked. But we really didn’t need to know what made him so loyal to his friends.
I’ve watched a lot of movies lately that would normally never cross my mind. In one, a sixteen-year-old girl takes down a radical rightwing cell intent on killing a liberal senator. A lot of time is wasted telling about how her parents died after an attack by neo nazis. Everything I needed to know as a viewer, I saw in the scene where she runs away from her foster parents.
Now, the author needed all the backstory. The author needed to know what happened in that girl’s life that made her into a kind of survivalist with an amount of rage that bursts into action when her friend is murdered in front of her. But the viewer or reader didn’t need that information to tell what kind of person she was.
I was asked recently how much research I do on topics I write about. The answer is dissertation-worthy. That doesn’t mean I get all the details correct. Anyone with a real knowledge of a subject will readily point out flaws in what I write. But I have a lot of research.
Before I drafted Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) The Gutenberg Rubric, I spent nearly a year doing research, after having taught print history for ages. But there were a lot of subjects I wasn’t up on. One of the books I read was 40 Centuries of Ink by David Nunes Carvalho, published near the end of the 19th century. It traced out all the developments in creating ink over those years. Then there was Printer’s Marks by W. Roberts, 1893. Or Wilson and Wilson’s Comprehensive Analytical Chemistry, Volume XLII: Non-destructive Microanalysis of Cultural Heritage Materials.
There were tons of other books I read and annotated in about 150 pages of pencil, shown above. But when I shared my first incomplete draft with Sonja Black, the Book Doctor, she said that even though I needed all that information to write the book, the reader didn’t need it all to enjoy reading the book. It wasn’t part of the story.
The same is true of character development. You might need to research an entire biography of your main character, but what the reader needs to know is that his actions are consistent with his personality, ability, and resources.
So when you place a conflict before your character, you need to be sure the action of the character is consistent. Once you have the intersection of conflict and character, action has to follow. When there are actions, you can build the plot.
Of course, there are dozens of other ingredients to toss into your mix. But next week, we’ll take a look at the Plot. Which comes first? The character or the plot?
This is number 129 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“PRIDE GOETH BEFORE A FALL.” So says a proverb that often summarizes what we refer to as a tragic flaw, or hamartia. A person is so sure of himself and so prideful that his well-intentioned actions bring about his own downfall—all because he can’t see past his own certainty. In this case, it is called hubris, or excessive pride, originally toward the gods.
It is only one character trait that might lead to a downfall, or serious misjudgment or crisis. Insecurity, guilt, depression, cowardice, cruelty, trust issues, judgementalism, perfectionism, narcissism, and over competitiveness are all traits that might lead to a conflict. But what role do they have in developing a character for your novel?
My personal opinion is that the most important aspect of writing a novel is to have characters who are so well-developed and real that people fall in love with them or into intense hatred of them. A character that doesn’t inspire a strong emotional response is a wasted character.
Here’s why: Character drives action. Action drives plot.
It’s really that simple. Once you have great characters, their actions in whatever circumstances you place them will automatically drive the plot of your story. Creating such characters should be the first and foremost priority in writing your novel.
That’s all, of course, my opinion. You’ll certainly find other opinions that disagree. But since it’s mine, I’ll talk about it as the most important.
When I decide on a story to tell, I start by figuring out whose story it is. Is it Tony Ames (Model Student), Brian Frost (Living Next Door to Heaven), Dennis Enders (Team Manager), Jacob Hopkins (The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins), or perhaps Nate Hart (Photo Finish)? These characters are referred to as protagonists. They are the ones around whom the stories revolve.
I needed to start by defining who those characters were and what made them tick. I described them on paper. You can start just about anywhere with this. What does the character look like? Five-ten, 160 pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, somewhat athletic, glasses, large hands, straight nose. What’s next?
If it helps, you can do an image search that matches your description. You might actually see the person you described. I invented this description and then looked it up at Shutterstock.
In finding images, you might even further your development of the description. Does he have a beard? Is he Chinese? Is he very unsure of himself? Long hair? Short hair. Snappy dresser? All those can go into your bank of character descriptions.
When I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits, back in 2017, I researched and developed every character in the story in detail. I used 3x5 index cards to record the details so I could tack them onto a cork board as I plotted the story. I also developed a web page with every character on it, complete with a photo of most. With a cast as large as that in City Limits and Wild Woods, it was helpful to me to remind myself of what a character is like when it was a chapter or two between times he or she was mentioned.
The significant thing about this is that every character was consistent with the description I’d created. Not every character description was explicitly included in the text of the novel. You don’t have to spell out the description all at once if you create a believable and consistent character.
City Limits and the sequel Wild Woods are available as eBooks at ZBookStore, and in paperback at online retailers.
So far, all you have is a physical description. The character goes much deeper than that. It’s time to dig into who that person really is. My obsession with that started with my first draft of Devon Layne’s A Touch of Magic back in the late 1970s. It was the first ‘novel length’ story I’d written and I discovered that I’d really short-changed it in terms of character development.
Walking home from my first ever critique of my writing, I started asking questions of the most problematic character. I’d spouted off a number of questions about his situation in the novel and during a pause at a traffic light, distinctly heard him say in my head, “If you’d just be quiet a minute, I’ll tell you all about it.” That began my first “interview” with a character. It is a technique I have used frequently over the years.
When I wrote Nathan Everett’s Seattle Noir series, I actually created a journal site for the lead female character and several young women agreed to participate in helping create her. Not only was I not female, I was thirty years older than the character. The participants conducted interviews with the character, shared life stories, and made her real in my mind.
When I wrote Devon Layne’s Model Student series, I actually conducted interviews with over fifteen of the characters to find out what was really going on in their heads. I published those as The Triptych Interviews so other readers who were interested could dig deeper into the characters. I found this to be a very effective way of developing a character that people really relate to.
Why? Why go to all that work for something that won’t actually appear in your novel?
Part of being convincing in the pages of your novel is having characters who behave consistently in your head. If I have a character, for example, who is a true atheist, I really can’t have him spout religious affirmations or even curses. What is he likely to yell instead?
The same is true of any other aspect of the character’s life. And somewhere in that investigation, you will uncover the character’s tragic flaw. Remember that? You will find that his intense loyalty to another person causes him to hurt an innocent bystander. His over confidence leads him into a situation where he is badly beaten. You will find his belief that his marriage is a kind of everlasting tower that he can step outside of and still get back in, leaves him weakened in the face of a tempting woman with whom he cheats on his wife.
It is the underlying flaw that will often determine the action and the result of the action the character initiates.
And that is where we will pick up next week. Character drives action. How do you match the character with the action you want in your novel?
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