The pace of a new novel I’m working on has slowed down–worse than slowed, it’s come to a crunching halt. Something about “Chapter 8″ has me in a temporary stall.
I say “temporary” because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that no case of writers’ block is permanent. In fact, one of the things I specialize in doing with my coaching clients is getting them off the hook and moving forward again.
Well, Physician heal thyself! What’s going on here? Let’s take a look and see…
Tolstoy, who as far as I know was never blocked, took one essential step before the writing began, namely: he would immerse himself in every article, book, or pamphlet that might illuminate his subject until he had, in effect, eaten it all, as a huge meal, digested it, and felt it become part of his cell biology. Then he would write.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating (Tolstoy scholars, fire away), but in my own case, I noticed something about “Chapter 8″ that I think is the key to my dilly-dallying: ch 8 is the first chapter that involves specialize knowledge I don’t yet possess.
Normally I write first draft with just enough knowledge to keep the story moving credibly, but leave my heavy research until after I’ve written “The End” and I’m ready to tackle the first revision.
But normally my fiction doesn’t involve highly specialized knowledge.
I have never written a story in which science, to be specific, and a particular subset of a science at that, plays a key role.
Never, that is, until now.
The heart of “Chapter 8″ is a scene in which the main character, a woman, undergoes implantation of an embryo, as part of an in vitro procedure. And I have no idea what exactly is done, how it’s done, if it’s painful or not, or any of a host of other details.
Often when you’re blocked, it’s because you don’t yet have enough of specialized knowledge to write what you need to write. You need more depth, more detail, or some peripheral take on that’s missing from your experience, but vital to the scene.
So here I go. I’m about to spend the next 2 hours reading everything and anything I can find on the internet about in vitro.
Will it work? If you see a “Chapter 8″ pop up in the right sidebar, I solved my problem. Stay tuned.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. I’m stuck on Chapter 12. Actually, to be stuck would mean I’d started it. I have started a story in the present time, gone back in time to a lot of back story and now I’ve gotten past what may or may not be “the inciting incident”. I need to resume the story in the present day and I haven’t figured out how to do it. I’m afraid it’s not so much a matter of being blocked, as being overloaded with obligations that is keeping me from visualizing how to move the story forward. The only cure for that that I know of is that I need to free up some time to let the “what ifs” lead me in the right direction. But maybe that’s a form of procrastination because I can find an hour now and then to write a blog post. Any advice?
Try opening a new chapter. Just that simple maneuver makes it possible to restart in the present without much heavy lifting. What you restart WITH can help, too. I’d advise a meditative scene from the point-of-view of the character most impacted (by the events of the flashback, that is), creating a thematic bridge to the flashback. It’s harder to do this using a scene with lots of characters and events.