By Elaine L. Orr
I generally have a story idea, make a series of notes and take off. I'll jot more notes as I go about what to put where or what a character's back story is, but I don't outline.
Instead, I do a "chapter summaries" document that has bullet points on each chapter and a few notes to myself about what subplot an event relates to, but it isn't detailed. It helps me keep track of the story.
There are times when I...simply...stop. I don't think of it as writer's block, more as a thinking detour. The two times I've put projects away I came back to them (years later). A philosophical person would say the story didn't cry out to be written until then. I would say I did enough other writing that my thoughts on the delayed books had time to percolate.
What about those poor characters? When I was a very young child (just getting into chapter books) I worried that if I closed a book the characters would be stuck between the pages, maybe unable to breathe. (I was a strange kid.)
As a writing adult, I put the characters on some form of transport conveyance. In Falling Into Place, the grandfather and granddaughter took a bus from her school to his house when she had chicken pox. They were on that bus a loooong time. In a book I finished but did not publish, the characters rode on the DC metro. Not for quite as long.
I recently finished The Judge's Last Contest, and it took much longer than it should have. I dawdled, put together a couple of bags for the thrift store, worked on a big genealogy project, and even cleaned. The dawdling took place over several weeks. I wrote but I should have simply worked harder.
Why? I don't write literary fiction or complex thrillers. My mysteries aren't simple, but they shouldn't be so hard to write at times. When in doubt, google. I didn't want a book or article on good writing habits. I found and ordered Laraine Herring'a On Being Stuck: Tapping Into the Creative Power of Writer's Block. Google told me she, "frames blocks not as an enemy, but as a signal where hope meets fear in the middle of a project." Catchy.
I also came across Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, about a novelist who's stalled on an endless manuscript -- and he even had a contract! My husband had a copy and says it's one of his all-time favorites, very funny as well as thought-provoking.
I'll read both and then wrote about this topic again. And I'll give myself a few days and start another book. In today's crazy retail environment, that's the way to survive.
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