Hit a wall? (Photo by Eddie07)

And, you hit a wall.  That, my friend, is writer’s block.

To start, you need to figure out what your problem is, or rather where.  Where in the story are you being blocked?  Isolate and identify the part that is giving you writer’s block.

Here are 3 ways to break or surmount writer’s block:

1.  The first way is to muscle through the writer’s block.  Many writers, as well as myself, attempt to break through.  After all, it is a block, so let’s break it.  Why not?  Well, as Michael Banks says in Writer Magazine, “This brute-force approach rarely lends itself to writing.”  However, there is some things that you can do here, if you must keep going.

You should take a short break.  Get a cup of ocha or something.  Then in another file on the computer, write a summary of what you want to happen.  For example, you know that your main character has to escape from Mr. Dastard, but you are not sure how.  Write out a summary of the struggle, and think of something for the escape (anything is okay for now), and what you want to happen afterwards up to your next plot point.  You now have something.  If you must keep going, go ahead and write the parts after the escape.  If you do not need to keep going, put your writing aside, and go walk the dog.  After a little bit of time, you will start coming up with alternatives to the escape that you just wrote.  Simply having something will tease your mind into coming up with a better something.  Then, go back to your file and rewrite it.

2.  Another way is to skip the section that is giving you writer’s block entirely.  If we use the same example, you would write XXX  in the escape section of your character’s story, and just keep going.  Also from Michael Banks, quoting the great Jerry Pournelle:

Write what you know. “Get as much as you can on paper as fast as you can,” Pournelle says. “Skip ahead and write the parts you already know how to write. You can go back later and fill in the rest.” As you jump ahead, write notes to yourself about what you intend to write-or just leave a place marker, like “XXXXX.”

This way works also with 1, if you leave a note instead of XXXX.  Something like, “escape scenes go here.”

3.  The third way is somewhat similar to number 1.  To beat writer’s

Photo by Skinnyde

block, think.  Take a few moments and look out the window.

Many times, we start a story with one end in mind, or perhaps no actual ending visualized.  As time goes on, we get so deep into the narrative that we lose our way, or our characters do.  Maybe we have gone off the course we originally intended into the jungle of plot threads.  We cannot see how to get from here to the ending we had planned (hopefully) or we have no ending planned and no idea how to end the story.  In such cases, some moments, or even hours, of quiet reflection can give you the time you need to pull it all together or perhaps to find the missing piece.

There are other ways to beat writer’s block, but these are the three that I’ve found most useful.  Give them a try.

Have any good ideas to beat writer’s block?  Leave me a message.

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What if you lived on the edges of society, and your father was a drunk?  What if your closest friend was an outcast?  How would you feel?

What if you joined the army, but in your first battle, fear overcame you.  You fled.  What would happen?  What would you do?  How would you feel?

How would you feel in these situations?  For those of us stuck in our comfortable lives, it seems hard to even imagine such things.

Can you have empathy with someone you have never met?  Can we even begin to imagine such things?

Yes.  Yes, we can.

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I often find myself rewriting large parts of my story, and I have decided that, often, this is actually a better way to work.  When I rewrite, I already know the story I am working on.  I know where it is going to go, probably, and I also have a good idea of where the problem points are.  By rewriting it, I can focus on where improvements are needed.

These improvements come down to things that I tend to hurry through in the first draft in my drive to get the story down on the screen.  Things like suspense, background, character traits, and simply drawing connections between things.  I also always find a place where two minor characters can be rolled into one or where a character can play an usual role later on.

You may wonder why rewriting is better than revising.  The reason is simple: ego.  You wrote these wonderful words on the page the first time.  There are certainly some very clever bits.  Can you just cut them out?  It is hard.  It is even harder to rewrite scenes that you spent ages developing, although you know in your gut they need to be completely redone.  That is another kind of writer’s block.  An ego and laziness block.  It is easier and safer for your ego to just tweak them by revising.  Don’t do it though.

You know you could rewrite them better.  Go ahead.  Give it a shot.

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So?

For most of us, this is not a big deal, but I think that we stop and take a few moments to look back at the last year.  What did you want to get done this year in your writing that you could not?  What did you accomplish?  Where do you want to go from here?

The end of the year is an important time to take stock of where we are in our lives and careers also.  Take a few moments, get a beer or a nice glass of wine and stare out the window.  Think about it.

 ZBDJSUNNMHNH

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Good characters really help a story, as does a good setting, good writing, and good dialogue.  We all know this.  However, we have seen poor examples of all of these.  They are not hard to find.

How can such stories succeed?  These stories can succeed simply because they have the main ingredient, the one thing that no story can be without.  That, of course, is conflict, though perhaps tension is a better word.

Without tension, you have no story.  We could have a wonderful character developed over years of thinking and experimenting, but if he has no problem, than he is just a talking head.  Boring.  These are the stories you read in writers’ workshops or those college writing classes you took, the ones where you said, “Well, George, I like your use of _____, but nothing seems to happen in your story.”

However, even if we have a flat character, in a plain setting, with poor writing, you can have a story if you add tension.  For example, many have said that The DaVinci Code has many weak points, which may or may not be true, but it is filled with tension from start to end.  That carries it through any faults it has.

It is with tension that you need to start.  When we rewrite, we need to add more.  We need to manage it, bring it up or down, decide where, when, and how to resolve it, and how reveal tension.  Neglecting it will cripple or kill a story by boring your reader.  Tension.  This is storytelling’s main ingredient.

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Kabikaboo

These are other kinds of software that I would recommend for a writer using Ubuntu.

Artha:

Every writer needs a good thesaurus, and Artha does the job well here.  It is available from the Ubuntu Software Center.  When it is running, if you highlight a word and then hit a key combination, it will look the word up for you.  It gives synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, attributes of, and similar words.

Very useful.

Click on the picture for a closer look.

In the end, I was satisfied with the selection of writing software that I found.  With the addition of superb programs like Scrivener, Celtx, and Libre Office, Ubuntu has proved that it is an operating system that should be considered by serious writers.  For more information on the operating system itself, look at this Ubuntu page.

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Most people who have read a book about characterization have heard phrases like, “Once you let your characters free, they will surprise you with the things they do,” or something like, “My characters took over the story and it went in a place I never meant it to go.”

Really?  Can that happen?

Well, maybe, I suppose.

Stories, or to be more specific plot, develops from the mix of character, setting, and situations (what is happening around them, the history/back story, and their relationships).  For example, The Odyssey is a story that grows out of Odyseus’ personality, the setting of the Ancient Mediterranean, and the situation (returning from the war, the problems in Ithaca, his crew’s desires).

It depends on the writer, but I think what is happening here is that the writer didn’t really know his or her character that well, or perhaps found new depth to the character that expressed itself in the revision, or as they wrote.

That is fine, of course.  Everyone writes differently.  I tend to have a rough idea of story in mind, but at the same time, I have already envisioned the characters for this story.  Which comes first, the character or the story?

I don’t know.  In the story I am working on now, the battle of two characters, the pair act in response to each other and their setting.

So can characters act on their own?  Maybe.  If they seem to do so, well, may be we are doing something right.

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It had been banging around in my head for months now,and I was getting irritated with it, so I had to release it, but after typing for an hour, I really had nothing more than a first scene and a glimpse of where I wanted to go. That meant I needed to find another 80,000 words somewhere.

A few months passed.  I returned to Japan.  I knew what I had–basically a classic story of two foes, with a bit of a romance also. I originally imagined it as a King Arthur/ Lancelot/ Guinevere type love triangle set in a setting that resembled old Rome.  Most of this would later change as the writing progressed, but before that happened, I hit the great void–writer’s blank.

I knew where I wanted to end, but I did not know how to get there.  I spun out a few side plots: the villian, the heroine, the brother, the best friend, and so on.  The story seemed to slow, and it meandered for awhile, but finally, nothing went forward.

Sometime in 2007, I went back to my first scene.  Instead of looking years down the road, literally, to the end, I decided to plan to the next dramatic peak.

I decided what this peak would be.  Then, over the next few months, I wrote the main character to that peak.  I fleshed that out.

Then decided his next peak, and did the same thing. I went through most of the first part of the story like this.

Now, I could see where I was going.  It was like turning on a few streetlights on a dark road.  You could see the curves ahead in the darkness.  I carefully began again, taking the other major characters along with my main character, knitting the story  up to the first plot point that sat in my figurative string of yarn like a knot.

So, I think that I learned that when I write, I should get the main plot line down.  From this, all else will grow outward.

I suppose it is like a road.  Once the road is laid, the avenues and lanes that branch off it can be put in place, but they all depend on that one main road.

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