Getting around the block
It’s official: I am blocked. Not a bowel thing, I’m talking writer’s block. Several different stories I have tried to work on recently have all come to a screeching halt.
Part of it is probably my distraction from having so many stories out. I’ve never had so many under consideration, especially stuff I really believed had a shot at selling. My quality has gone up of late (I think) and maybe I’m expecting too much of myself. Like Mur says, I am allowed to suck. Easier said than done.
So what am I going to do about it? In the past, switching stories has tended to unblock me. I dug out an older story based on an idea my father pushed on me. I read it last night and was pleased with what I had, but it was only half done. It had gone through a lot of iterations to get where it is now and it’s ready for an ending (and a middle). I’ve already tapped away at it. While I still don’t feel like I’m producing grade-A prose, I’m reasonably happy with the way it’s progressing. I’ll work on it a lot tonight; I’m aiming to add 2000 words before bed. I seldom get large chunks of keyboard time.
My hope is that finishing this story will open up some creative juices for at least one of my other works in progress. There are quite a few.
- Untitled sound story (that’s the one I’m picking up now)
- Untitled mother vs. daughter story
- Leech Run — story that got me waitlisted for CW, but my rewrite stalled out
- Untitled female warrior story
- Thinking Out Loud — military experiment story
- All my novels: Honor by Proxy, untitled YA space novel, Tones of Magic, Eversio and Podera, The Legend of Eversio (prequel), untitled space comedy… It’s a wonder I ever finish anything.
With all these options to work on, surely I can get something written. I’ll keep everyone posted. In the meantime, I’d love to hear other people’s writer’s block stories and how you’ve gone about beating it.
-Oso
Scott W. Baker: Chaos out of Chaos 
I think working on something different will help a lot. I find I don’t really get writer’s block in the traditional sense, but I do get hung up on one project or another sometimes.
Sometimes I get stuck because I have so many ideas that I have trouble focusing and picking just one. I find the only way to get through that is to just pick something and make myself finish a draft. This works more easily on short stories than on novels though 🙂
I don’t know what “Honor by Proxy” is about, but the title would at least make me pick up the book and read the back, for what it’s worth. *grin*
Definitely wasn’t blocked tonight. Slow, but not blocked. I didn’t write the quantity I could have because I backed up to rewrite the scene I just wrote. My first pass was better prose with a weaker story (I overcompensate like that sometimes). I may end up adding a few beats here and there, but mostly it was a dump transition that readers will want to power through anyway. The net was about 2000 words. (The gross was closer to 2500 if you count what I cut.)
Now I need to dig up my original story notes on this one to remember where I intended this to end. It may not end there, but I need to remember where I intended to go with it.
I still need a title, too. How does “Epsilon Echoes” sound?