Sometimes the words fall easily from the keyboard and you find yourself serving as some sort of transcriptionist for the angels. It would be nice if every book was written that way.
Most of the time it is the other way. You get out the hammer, the chisel, the tongs. You break a nail. You get bruised. You bust your lip. But somehow you get those words out onto the screen. And after stumbling and fumbling long enough, you decide to call it a book.
I should know. I’ve written 20 of them. Actually, I’ve written more than 20 of them, but thankfully some of them will never see the light of day. I’ve published 20 of them. And if it were always easy, everyone would be a writer. It’s work, plain and simple.
And this latest project has been work for me. Plain. and. Simple.
For me, the process requires taking an idea and making it live inside your head. Then you make it vivid enough that you feel you can describe it in words and recreate it in someone else’s head. That’s what writing is all about for me.
But what happens if I can’t get that image to come to life in my own head? That’s the challenge I’ve been faced with for the past few months. My last solo project was Chosen, which I completed early in 2014. Then I co-authored Salome’s Charger in late 2014-early 2015, which finally finished around September 2015. That takes into consideration all the editing and marketing stages, which I don’t really count as writing, but still take lots of time.
The project I am currently starting, which has had multiple titles, I started planning in early 2014. I plotted and replotted and did character studies and even wrote some short stories. It got really, really complex. So complex, in fact, that I broke off part of the story and decided to write some of the backstory as the first part of the book, or maybe the first book in the series? I don’t know. All that I know is that it was both driving me crazy and yet wasn’t clear enough in my head to let me write it.
So what do you do when you have writer’s block? One, you can do other stuff. Which is what I did for a while, and it didn’t go away. Or two, you can ignore it and bull yourself through it. That’s the tack I’m taking now. And it seems to be working. I’ve gotten a truncated first chapter done, and am halfway through a second one. Despite all warnings to the contrary, I’ll be sharing portions of it here pretty quickly. Why? Because I am tired of trying to explain the unexplainable to people….
Anyway, that’s just a few ravings from a crazy writer who’s elated to be unstuck from writer’s block.
Later, dudes and dudettes.
The Great Adventure 