NaNo2010 > The Blockade
Posted under: 
No, I haven’t forgotten about the NaNo2010 posts.
Nor have I been ignoring it, too busy to think about it, or any of a HOST of perfectly valid-seeming excuses I could give you.
Excuses that I have, to be honest, been giving myself because I didn’t want to face the truth.
The truth, gentle readers, is that I find myself staring at a blockade.
Step 1: Admit You Have a Problem
I can’t move past the blockade without acknowledging its existence.
Ignoring the issue and hoping it will resolve itself over time is no longer an option.
Step 2: Ferret Out The Root
I have sat down to work on the plotting and outlining over a dozen times and gotten no farther. That is (in a way) a very good thing because I’ve got a dozen test cases. I’ve approached this problem from multiple angles and gotten the same results.
What is stopping me? What is causing the problem? WHERE am I hitting this blockade?
The answer lies in the squishy middle of the book.
The Squishy Middle
I know how I want it to start, I know how I want it to progress for the first few chapters, and I know how I want it to end.
I do not know what conflicts I’m going to toss up in the middle bit to shake things up and keep the characters on their toes.
This is a REGULAR PROBLEM for me.
This isn’t new. This isn’t related to just this one story. This is something that hits me every time I have tried to plot a story.
Step 3: Mark The Paths
Multiple solutions present themselves to me.
1) Give up now.
(Hey, I didn’t say they’d all be GOOD solutions)
The Justification: When faced with a problem you don’t want to deal with, the first and easiest solution is to walk away. Maybe this story isn’t worth the effort. You can write this OTHER story* instead. That’s not the same thing as giving up, right? That’s just shifting focus!
The Retort: If your story is truly beyond all hope, then DO let it go. Walk away. You have to ask yourself honestly if you’re leaving the story because you CANNOT fix it or if you’re leaving a story because you don’t want to put forth the effort to fix it.
2) Leave the middle squishy.
The Justification: Who cares if the middle is a bit soggy? The beginning is crackerjack, and we all know that a story changes as you write it. You’ll probably come up with great conflicts to shore up that squishy middle as you write the beginning!
The Retort: I have done this. I have finished a manuscript and royally screwed up a second. Even when this works, it results in a LOT of extra effort after the manuscript is over during the revising process. Having gone through MULTIPLE ROUNDS OF HEAVY REVISION let me assure you that extra work before writing is so. incredibly. worth. the. time.
If you are capable of firming up a squishy book middle while you write without going insane, then I encourage you to follow whatever path you choose.
For me, leaving it squishy is a bad idea.
3) Confront the Problem
The Justification: None. This is the hard way. I rarely try to wheedle myself into doing things the hard way. Mostly, I just sit in a dark corner of my brain and pout.
Something is keeping me from moving forward on plotting this book. If I operate from the assumption that I am NOT a moron and that I AM capable of plotting a book, I can work through this.
If I assume that I am not good enough or too stupid to fix this problem, I am crippling myself from the outset. I will never trust myself when the work gets harder.
I need to stop staring at the blockade and start picking it to bits until it crumbles.
Maniac McGee
Have any of you ever read the book Maniac McGee? I read it in middle school and I still own a copy. One of my favorite scenes from Maniac McGee is when he untied The Knot.
You see, McGee had a talent for untying knots. Give him a tangled shoe string or fishing line and he’d have it freed up lickety split. A local pizza parlor had an ancient rope outside its door with years of tangling and weathering. They offered free pizza to anyone who could untie the knot. Nobody ever could – until McGee.
McGee spent DAYS unraveling that knot. He didn’t rush, didn’t hurry, didn’t get frustrated or give up. He picked away at it, tiny bit by tiny bit and at first, it didn’t seem like he was actually accomplishing anything.
In the end, his patience and skill won out and he untied the knot.
(I really did not do justice even to this one scene in the book. If you like Middle Grade fiction, I really recommend the story.)
I am going to hold McGee up as my example. I have made a right mess of my plotting somehow, and I will find a way to unsnarl it.
And maybe I’ll reward myself with some pizza when I finally figure it out, in the spirit of Maniac McGee.
Concrete Examples
Oh, sure, “Confront The Problem” sounds all well and good on paper, but I’m talking about a book plot, not a neighborhood bully. I can hardly pants my plot and steal back my lunch money.
So what do I intend to do?
1) Pen and Paper. Sometimes, I just think better with a pen in my hand. I modified my Outliner** application so that it has a “simple print” feature and I can print out my outlines and work with them on paper.
2) Journalling. Mentally thinking about my problems is tracking me in circles. I need to write it down. Do some stream-of-consciousness writing. By pinning down my worries and my thoughts and my ideas, I make them more real.
Bre recently got me interested in simple web app called 750Words.com which encourages you to write every day by rewarding streaks and keeping track of your word count – while still giving you absolute privacy on your writing. So far, I’m enjoying it and the rewards system is a great way to encourage myself to write every day. Doesn’t matter if that writing is plot journaling, writing prompts, Choose installments, or actual book writing.
3) Entering the Monastery. That’s what Holly Lisle calls it, anyway. Mentally (or physically) distancing yourself from the world and finding a quiet, distraction-free place to FOCUS on your plot. Whether that will be five minutes, half an hour, or half a day, I do not know. But it seems that if I do not force it to do otherwise, the world likes to interrupt me after about two minutes of solitude. It’s a wonder I can concentrate on anything at all, some days.
Guarantee
There’s no guarantee that this will work. I certainly hope it will, but if it doesn’t, I’ll find another way to work through my issues.
As a fake starship pilot once said, “Never give up! Never surrender!”
You
I’m sure we’ve all hit a blockade at one time or another, whether it be with writing or some other activity.
If you feel like it, I’d love to hear about a time you were blockaded and how you dealt with the issue. Are you blocked now? What are your plans to get past it?
* Beware the Shiny New Story Distraction. You’ll get bitten with it every time you get tired or frustrated with your current book. You’ll be convinced this NEW story is much better than the one you’re currently working on and you’ll wake up from a plot-induced binge years later, surrounded by half-finished manuscripts.
** I think the Outliner app is finally ready for other folks to play around with, if you’re interested. It probably won’t stand up to a lot of really hard testing, but if you just want to play with it a little, I don’t mind sharing the link. It is just a side project for me, so I can’t guarantee the safety of your data. All I can say is that SO FAR, it has worked very well for me. Outliner
Ah, I love Galaxy Quest! I meant to comment a few days ago when I first read your post, but better late than never, I suppose. First, thank you for sharing the Outliner app. I played around with it a little bit, and it’s quite interesting. I see how it maps to the way you were talking about brainstorming and opens up such an easy before/after style, so I hope it’s really working well for you! I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that will work for the way I brainstorm and outline–what I would do with it, I can do also in Scrivener, and I tend to add a lot of other stuff to some of the sections (because naturally some of my ideas have to come to me as a word and some come as a mini-novella in and of themselves), so I like the increased “space” of the synopsis, document notes, title, and document contents all being linked in Scrivener; also it means when I’m ready to flesh out any part, all my writing stays together and with at least a semblance of organization. But I imagine that the way I work would be a lot of overkill for others and I think the cleanliness of your Outliner is probably a huge boon to helping focus and just generate ideas. Also I think it’s just so neat that you were unhappy with the tools available and decided to make your own!
As far as the “blockade” you talk about and getting around it, I mulled over this a little–just enough time to have come up with something I wanted to share and then forgotten about it. But something that I’ve used a bit in the past to at least come at the problem sideways is to flesh out characters: to really sit down and figure out goals, beliefs, motivations, and issues (internal struggles or difficulties they ideally should overcome–anything from “he thinks everyone who disagrees with the government is just stupid or uneducated” to “she’s an alcoholic” to “he copes with reality by re-imagining it all as a Hollywood blockbuster”). Then taking that, I can often figure out what the character arc wants to be for the story. Sometimes there’s of course already the “what I want to happen” at the end, what my basic idea for growth was, but often for supporting characters I haven’t developed this much yet, and even for the main characters this often turns up more specific matters to deal with than a general “she should mature and come to terms with her past.” When I can see the particular struggles my character has and what her typical reaction is to events, it help also to solidify the sort of events that need to happen for her to have her arc. If she’s dealt negatively with situation X before, how would it have to change for her to react differently and start to advance on her arc? The more I play with that, the more I understand and live with the characters and in their world, and also the more concrete “plot points” become–I know what has to happen to a character to make them take this next step, and so bit by bit that “squishy middle” starts getting filled in with details.
…I think I just wrote my 750 words for the day, so I’ll have done now. ;)
@Jehanne
Being a programmer definitely has its perks. I’m finding some frustrations with the outliner system as my outlines get longer and longer. Once scrolling is introduced, it starts to get very clunky. But! It did what I needed it to do, and was good practice for if I ever rewrite the app to be more professional.
The ideas you have about working through the characters’ personal arcs are quite good, thank you for sharing! I think I’ll spend some time working through those. =]