So some of you may have remembered that last year I was invited to speak the next year at the local library's author month.
Well suprisingly the year has rolled around and I was asked to speak on the 7th with some of my other writer friends speaking the next three Wednesdays.
Its been a blast and i survived my first author presentation. Which is a good thing because I am the substitute teacher for my freind who will be almost 9 months pregnant on april 14 when she's supposed to teach a class on Structure in Ephiram Ut.
But that isn't the theme of this post. Last Wed. My friend Sara and I were talking about writing and strucutre. She is a screenwriter and writes her books out in screenplay form then fleshes them out. I am a Structure gal and who writes "panster" style as long as I follow my Structure.
Again I am getting sidetracked.
In the converstaion she mentioned that when she gets writers block she asks herself what the worst thing she could do to her characters, or what is the one thing the main character wouldn't want. Then writes it.
Or she imagines something completely off the track of what she are currently writing, and writes it in the MS. I am quoting her directly here:
"Imagine ninja monkees droping from the roof."
That image in my head startled me and I laughed hard for a few minutes. Now don't think that my next book is going to have all sorts of goofieness in it so you can tell when I was stuck in the writing process. Once the scene is finished, the writers block is gone and you can most likely resume on your previous course, you delete the silly/horrible/tragic scenes. That is, unless you hit gold in your moments of trying to destroy your main character and have to keep the scene because it's all sorts of awesome.
I guess the lesson is to change your course to something completely diferent when your stuck or going nowhere.
What are your strategies for getting out of the dreaded writers block?
2 comments:
I think your tactic is a good one. Mostly I agree with just get in and write anything. Sometimes I try just writing out dot points and coming up with 10-20 things that 'could' happen in this scene and pick the one I like, or I do free writing from that character's point of view.
Wagging Tales
Great suggestion! It's always good to think outside the box and that includes the box we tend to develop around our stories. My writer's group encouraged me to do that very thing last night. We can't afford to "underwhelm" our readers.
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