Category Archives: Writer’s block

Writer’s Block: Three Strategies to Beat It

The Complete Writer

Section IX: Creative Strategies

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[48]

Writer’s Block: Three Strategies to Beat It

Back in the day when I was a working journalist, various writers’ conferences would invite me to speak. Invariably, aspiring freelance writers would ask that classic question: How do you cope with writer’s block?

Well, I didn’t: reporting on assignment is not an activity that elicits writer’s block. A reporter an artiste does not make. The collected flip answers lacked something in the helpful department:

  • Visualize your byline on a paycheck’s Pay to the Order of line.
  • Imagine your editor’s response when you call to say you’ll be late on deadline.
  • Write a letter to your mom describing all the things you learned on assignment. The story will write itself after that.
  • Go play with the cat.
  • Pour yourself a (glass of wine, cup of coffee, can of soda).
  • Go for a walk.
  • Quit with the drama already and get down to work!

Fiction, however, is one heckuva lot harder to write than nonfiction. So much so, in fact, that you really do reach impasses where you know what you want to say (you think) and you imagine you know what your characters are going to do and you can envision the time and the place and the action but it just won’t come out in words!

Nothing makes coping with this phenomenon easy, but a few strategies have come to hand. Try this one, for example:

§

Enter your notes, no matter how fragmentary, at the bottom of a chapter or scene. Use these notes as cues to help jump-start the narrative and keep it rolling around.

§

In this problematic scene, Lhored Brez of Grisham Lekvel (he’s roughly equivalent to an Anglo-Saxon king) visits the widow and two sister wives of one of his followers (Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos), murdered while catting around the trading center of the known world. Bett Kubnath of Cham Fos is a potentate in her own right. Her son Lenn is a chip off his father’s block, not an altogether flattering comparison. The action is seen through the eyes of Hapa Cottrite, a kind of public intellectual who has been sent into exile among the backward peoples of the north.

Draft

She nodded patiently. “Let’s sit down.” She waved us all toward the fine leather and wool chairs and benches that populated the hall. Lhored was directed into a comfortable armchair and I was seated nearby. The three women pulled up smaller chairs to make a conversation circle around Lhored, the two mayrs, and me. Food and drink appeared, borne by two [women who look working class] and a young boy, and we were all served, the solid stoneware dishes a luxury after our weeks of eating off tin plates.

“You’ve heard the news we bring,” Lhored began.

“Yes. We heard before Mak’s men reached Rittamun. One of the outlying herdsmen brought word a couple of days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She let this rest briefly. “They say he didn’t die in battle. Can you . . . will you tell us how this happened?”

Lhored looked pained. This, he had said more than once, was the conversation he dreaded, and here it was upon him. “Bett,” he said, “we don’t really know.”

Notes at the end of the file:

What is going on here? What is Hapa observing? Move forward into some other part of this chapter and then come back here. This piece is going nowhere!

Lhored is about to speak when Lenn shows up. Lenn is surly, aggressive, and obnoxious. He demands to know what happened to Mitch. What was he doing out there alone? Then he demands to know why they let him go out alone and D says he tried to go along and was rejected & the others say that’s so. They work their way around to saying HC was sent as a gift from the seeyo; they’d prob’ly better tell them about the elaborate funeral and the loot first.]

 All right. Let’s try that. It’s better than working, anyway. I guess.

Next draft

The front door opened, letting in a beam of light and the shadow of someone passing through the vestibule. A tall, slender young man, still beardless, entered the hall. Dressed in work clothes and boots, he pulled off a pair of riding gloves and offered a hand to Lhored, who, with Mak and Jode, stood to greet him.

”Grisham Lekvel,” he said, accepting a firm squeeze on the shoulder from the brez. “And gentlemen: thank you for coming. Mother,” he addressed the kubnath, who remained seated, “sorry I’m late. We were working the stallion up on the other side of Nole’s Butte. I came as soon as Wood let us know you were on the way up the road.”

”It’s good to see you, Lenn,” Lhored replied. “And good you were able to be here.”

He gestured as though he was about to introduce me to the young new kubna, obviously Mitchel of Cham Fos’s son, but Lenn interrupted.

”Lhored,” he said, “let’s get down to business. What the hell happened to my father?”

Meji gasped softly. The other two widows glanced at Lhored expectantly. Jode and Mak looked on, stolid as ever.

If Lhored was annoyed or otherwise perturbed, he didn’t let it show. “He was murdered,” he said.

”Yeah, so we’re told. How did that happen? And who did it?”

”He died on a street in Lek Doe. Apparently the killer was a thief that jumped him.”

”That doesn’t make any sense. My father would take out anyone who tried to bring him down.”

”He probably didn’t see the guy come up on him. It was stone dark that night.”

”Night?”

”Mm hm. We think it was pretty late. He’d been out on the town. And he was in a lane where all the shops were closed.”

”Come on, man! What the hell was he doing out in the middle of the night, on some godforsaken back street in Lek Doe where nothing was going on?” Behind him, Bett sent Lhored a narrow-eyed [CAUTIONARY? GIMLET? PIERCING? SHARP???] look and shook her head, almost imperceptibly, no.

”We don’t know, Lenn. He must have gotten turned around and lost his way.”

”How the devil could something like that happen? Who was with him?”

”No one.”

”No one? What was he doing out there?”

Lhored regarded Lenn while he let this set for a second or two. “He was celebrating, lad. Far as we can tell, he’d just come from a saloon.”

Salon was more like it, I thought. Liana’s place did let the liquor flow, so one could call it a bar. Sort of.

“Celebrating? If he was partying, why wasn’t anybody with him?”

Notes at the end of the file

At least we’ve got some conflict going on, between the chief warlord and the surly young son of the deceased potentate, heir to his father’s rank.

We haven’t gotten around to the delicate matter of why Mitchel refused to take anyone with him when he went out for a night on the town—he was haunting his favorite houses of ill repute—nor have we explained the potentially explosive matter of why Hapa Cottrite is present: he was sent by the town’s governing councilors as a kind of “gift” to express their regret at the loss of a powerful and dangerous warlord, their hidden motive being to exile a troublemaker to the farthest of all possible boondocks. But at least we have something in glowing little computer characters.

§

Remember that gold is a soft metal. Your golden words are malleable—NOT graven in granite!

§

Regard what you’ve written as draft at all times. Never stop revising. And be aware that it’s a lot easier to revise and rework than it is to choke out brand-new creative content. Just get it down on paper. Or on disk. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Not the first time around, not the second time around, not the third time around.

Knowing that you can always jimmy the copy, add to the copy, cut the copy, totally change the copy makes it a lot easier to get something out.

Just write it, and don’t worry if it isn’t perfect.

Chapter 1, take 1

It should feel good, Kay thought. Watching this happen should feel good. He ought to feel back-slapping, hollering, falling-down-drunk happy, or at least for God’s sake like raising a swig of whiskey to the moment.

He and his cousin, Mitch–Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos–stood atop a promontory, just a low butte, actually, about a hundred feet tall, and surveyed the battle’s aftermath. Fallon, still clad in his leather chest armor, saw them climbing up here. He followed and joined them a few minutes after they stopped at the bluff’s edge. When he reached the two, he shook Kay’s hand, punched Mitch on the shoulder, congratulated them on a fine day’s work.

And the men had done a day’s work. Together the three looked out over the scene. Hengliss allies–Okan and A’oan marching under the Okan brez, Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel–had taken the town in three weeks flat. It was an incredible feat.

Roksan, the principal city of their principal enemy, should have been impregnable. But they had shown it was not. Now the men, scruffy irregulars, most of them, pressed into duty by the obligations of their betters and not because they knew much about soldiering, spread over the plain before the burning town’s gate. No one down there seemed to suffer any qualms. Their noise reached the hilltop as unruly hubbub like a huge outdoor party gone too far in drink. Men laughed and shouted, a few surviving women squealed as the boys had their fun with them, horses and wagons rattled around. Guys compared plunder, traded booty–some had set up open-air markets to trade or sell the loot they’d carried from the city before the heat pushed them out.

A brown and gray pillar twisted upward toward white clouds that galloped before a chasing wind, and Kay knew the smart breeze would keep those fires going until they had done their job. The place would burn to the ground before they smoldered out. The flames would leave a pile of ashes, maybe a few blackened rafters, charred bricks. And scorched bones.

Fal, wiry and saturnine, his dark beard and mustache trimmed as if to cut down wind resistance, offered his boda to the two older men. They accepted the liquor cheerfully. The drink passed between them while they gazed at the scene below.

“Beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Mitchel remarked.

“Oh, yeah,” Kay said. “That it is.”

“Must do your heart good.”

“You bet.”

“How long has it been for you?” Fal asked.

“Twenty-eight years,” Kay replied.

This actually was not the first but  the third or fourth time I’d tried to craft this opening scene in Kaybrel’s point of view. Hated it the first time; still wasn’t thrilling me. So I tried a new tack.

Chapter 1, take 10 or 12:

Fallon Mayr of Cheyne Wells rarely gave himself over to speculation. If on this good day you had asked him how the Hengliss tribes came to see themselves as one being, a living organism whose limbs and body and soul formed a single piece—or even if they did—he would have laughed. He would direct your attention to the pillar of smoke twisting skyward where Roksan burned, and he would turn your question obliquely around. He would ask you, then, had they not, the bands of Okan and A’o fighting as one under the Brez Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel, had they not done a fine thing?

He passed the lambskin flask that was making the rounds among several companions to Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek. Bova, a chunky flaxen-bearded northerner whose heft made Fal’s long, wiry frame look slight by comparison, lifted the boda in a friendly salute, swigged its unrefined contents as though he were taking a deep drink of water, and passed it to Kristof Mayr of Oshin.

“That was one hot maneuver you two pulled inside them gates,” Robin Mayr of O’a remarked to Fal. A slender, muscular young man with a smooth chestnut-colored beard, he accepted the boda from Kristof and lifted it vaguely in Fal’s direction.

“Mostly Kay’s idea,” Fal said. He shrugged as though he’d had little to do with the swath they’d ripped through the defenders in the long chaos after the Hengliss had breached the enemy city’s entrance.

“Bull!” said Jag Bova. “He couldn’t have done it by himself. And I’ll tell you—when he takes them kind of ideas into his head, I’m sure as hell glad I’m not the one who has to fight on his flank.”

Fallon laughed with the others. But he was glad, too, that it wasn’t Bova. He wouldn’t have traded his place at Kay’s side for any honor the brez could dream up.

“He had his reasons for going after the bastards like that,” Kristof remarked.

“Must have felt damned good,” Robin added. “If it’d been me, I’d have tried to squash every cockroach I could catch.”

“Yeah. Well, we just about did that,” Fal said. “Not too many of ’em left in there.”

Even where they were standing, a mile away, heat from the fires burning the sacked Espanyo city reached them. It took the chill off the cool air that drifted down the distant snow-covered Achpie and Serra peaks flanking the wide bottomland along the Wakeen Ribba.

“Ain’t none of ’em gonna crawl out of that place no more, no how,” Robin agreed. He passed the drink back to Rozebek.

Bova raised the flask to that, and they all murmured their appreciation of Robin’s whiskey-laced profundity.

“There goes your kubna with his cousin now,” said Bova. “Looks like they want to get a view of the doings.”

By “your kubna” he meant Kaybrel Kubna of Moor Lek, the man to whom Fal, Robin, and Kristof owed their first loyalty. The cowndee of Rozebek belonged to the house of Puns, and Jag Bova served its kubna, Rikad of Puns.

They watched Kaybrel and Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos stride through the festive troops gathered on the plain before the burning city. Kay was carrying his leather helmet in one hand, his silver-streaked hair flowing loose around his shoulders. To Fal’s eye, he looked tired, but the others didn’t see that. The two kubnas cleared the mob and headed toward a low butte that rose above what had a few hours earlier been a battlefield. They disappeared around the side of the promontory, seeking the gentle rise up the hill’s backside.

“How long has it been for him?” Robin asked.

“What? Since Moor Lek fell?” Fallon read meaning into Robin’s question. “I think he said . . . no, it was the kubnath who said that. Maire said it was twenty-eight years ago this spring.”

“Twenty-eight years! She wasn’t even born then, eh?”

“Neither were the rest of us,” Fal replied, and what he said applied to everyone there but Jag Bova, the only man among them to have reached his early thirties.

Sometimes if you can’t move forward with the new writing, going back and revising material you already have will help. Notice how radically different Take 2 is from the first effort: a different character’s point of view, an entirely different set of characters with the protagonist taken off center stage, facts presented in a slightly different context through the mouths of different characters, and a different kind of characterization of a central figure.

Every time you rewrite a scene from beginning to end, it improves. Often, even very small changes—a turn of phrase here, a gesture there, a detail or a word choice—have a large effect.

You may never use this evolving material. Or you may use some of it, whole cloth or much massaged. Whatever becomes of the drafts, it will give you some insight into what’s going on with your writing, and that may be all you need to put your Jeep back in gear.

[1] https://writersresidence.com/blog/2009/12/02/samples-of-query-letters-that-work/

[2] “The Good Order: Routine, Creativity, and President Obama’s U.N. Speech,” The New York Times, September 25, 2014.

[3] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf

Jump-Starting the Creative Engine

The Complete Writer

Section IX: Creative Strategies

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. You also can find links to the chapters that have appeared so far at our special page for The Complete Writer. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

[47]

Jump-Starting the Creative Engine

A client, needing to do rewrites of several chapters, suddenly felt a bit stymied. Mostly, I think, this happened because he was feeling tired and impatient to get finished. The end was in sight, and he really just wanted to get the book done!

While we were thinking about how he could re-energize himself for the last sprint, an Insight! occurred to me. And it’s an insight that appears to work.

Before inflicting it on him, I experimented with it on a passage of my own novel, where I also had run out of gas and dropped the narrative.

Here’s the idea: Whatever genre you’re writing in requires you to use a set of techniques specific to that genre. In the case of fiction, for example, these would be dialogue, narrative, description, setting, characterization, point of view, and the like. Other genres require other techniques—poetry, for example, demands more attention to imagery, iconography, meter, form, and the like.

When you feel you simply can not move forward with a scene, try writing that scene in some other genre. Instead of prose fiction, what if you wrote the passage as a scene in a stage play or a movie script? What if you wrote it in verse? What if you wrote it as a letter from one of the characters to one of the other characters? Or as a letter from you to your best friend?

With fresh ideas and action on paper, now go back and convert what you’ve written into the genre you’re actually writing.

Different genres require different writing techniques. Engaging these different modes requires you to engage a different set of mental skills and attitudes. If you take what you want to say and write it in a different genre, you force yourself to shift gears.

Let’s see how this worked on the passage of mine that ran out of energy.

First draft, replete with frustrated notes to self:

Shortly after midday, Jag Bova’s bands crested the pass through the low hills that cradled the southeast end of Rozebek Town. Warm as an Indian summer, the pleasant autumn afternoon was still and clear. A sapphire sky, unblemished but for a few distant, fluffy clouds, rested over the brown and gilded farmlands below. In the orchards, apple and walnut trees had already dropped their leaves, but here and there a maple or a pear clung to its scarlet and gold.

When he saw the village spread out before them, Bova’s heart filled with joy. Narrow lanes led out from the town plaza like spokes on a wagon wheel, the spaces between them filled with stone houses built four and six and sometimes even eight to a compound. Huddled together around common walls, the dwellings gained a little extra shelter from winter’s deepest cold. And there, entwined within the village, stood his own home, Rozebek Keep. Its high defensive fortifications were built of local gray stone, as was his private family compound’s tower that rose above the stokhed walls.

Alone among the Okan aristocracy’s fortifications, the Mayr of Rozebek’s keep formed a part of its village. The people’s homes came right up to the moat, making the keep an island in a small lake of human activity. Usually a kubnath’s or a mayr’s keep and dwelling stood atop a low rise anywhere from half a mile to two miles from its village. This difference pleased Jag Bova. If anyone disapproved, they hadn’t ventured to complain.

No one was complaining now. Around him men cheered, hooted, and laughed, delighted to find themselves within sight of home. [THEY SHOULD PASS A WATCHTOWER—AN OLD PERSON—MALE, FEMALE? SHOULD COME OUT WITH A COUPLE OF KIDS TO GREET THEM.]

A distant sound wafted up the hillside: music. Horns and fiddles, drums and tambourines, whistles and ghitters and recorders and pipes rose a merry clamor down in the village.

Semel, [WHAT DOES HE LOOK LIKE?] Bova’s monja, grinned when he heard the racket. “The party’s started without us,” he said.

One of the other men overheard and added, “Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.”

“Little Mama’s a-callin’,” another voice exclaimed. Here and there, men broke out of line and started to run or jog ahead.

“Get a grip on those clowns,” Bova said to Semel.

“Whoa! Settle down there!” Semel shouted. A few marchers, rowdy and not inclined to settle anywhere just then, gave him puzzled glances.

“Now listen to that, boys!” Bova hollered. His large presence got immediate attention. “The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?”

“What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?” a grizzled fellow on the sidelines hollered back.

“Let’s play them a tune or three of our own,” Bova replied. “Let’s us get ourselves

lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, get the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town.”

A ripple of laughter washed over the company closest to Bova and Semel. “That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights,” someone remarked.

“That it will,” Bova said. “Into columns! Where are those pipers?”

The band began to fall into rough columns, and shortly two men with small bagpipes, a couple of drummers, and a fife player gathered at the head of the company. Meanwhile, Bova lifted bags of gear off his charger, loaded them on a pack pony, and climbed into the saddle. Semel scouted up company’s banner, unfurled it from its pole, and handed it up to Bova, who secured it to its saddle, where it waved cheerfully in the crystalline air.

DESCRIBE THE CHIVAREE

§

This was where I gave up. Wrote the second half of the chapter. Went on to another client’s work. Sent a bill. Came back. Gave up. Did some other paying work. Graded student papers. Came back . . . and so on. I simply could NOT get past this scene or move on to the next one.

Here’s what happened when I switched from narrative mode to screenplay mode:

Second draft:

Characters

Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek, late the recipient of the honorific “Snow-Killer,” a massive chunk of a man with blond hair and a thick, curly blond beard.
Samel: Bova’s second-in-command (“monja”)
Gray-Bearded Regular Soldier
Assorted impressed fighters in the raiding bands of Rozebek
Pipers
Fifer
Drummers
Lieze Mayreth of Rozebek: Bova’s only wife; in her early 30s, plump, pretty, and self-contained.
Ada: Lieze’s mother; Bova’s mother-in-law, an aging image of her daughter
Erysa: Bova and Lieze’s elder daughter, a pretty young woman of about 16, as blonde as her father.
Mandeh: Bova and Lieze’s younger daughter, about 12
Deke: Bova and Lieze’s young son, about 8
Townspeople of various ages and gender
Rand, Belindeh, and Cammish: townspeople assigned to watch duty
Willard: Belindeh’s grandson

Scene 1

The crest of a low hill above a fertile valley. At the forested hilltop, birds sing, squirrels call, and a hawk drifts overhead as if watching the procession. Below lie farmlands, pasture, and the town of Rozebek, dominated by its mayr’s keep. The time is past noon on a clear, crisp autumn day. Jag Bova and Samel are leading their rag-tag band of Fighting men, all of whom are tired and anxious to get home.

As they reach the trail’s summit, they pass a stone watchtower. Its occupants, Rand, Belindeh, and Cammish turn out to welcome them.

Rand is a teenaged boy, Belindeh a hungry-looking middle-aged woman, and Cammish, an old man. They are all dressed in the homespun clothing of the time a nd place. Like the men, Belindeh wears rough work dungarees rather than a skirt.

Rand, fairly bouncing out the tower’s door: Mister Mayr! Mr. Samel! God bless you!

Belindeh, following Rand by some yards, advances to BOVA with arms extended and hugs him.

Belindeh: Thank God you’re home. Thank God!

Bova shakes Rand’s hand while he’s being hugged by Belindeh. Cammish, supported by a walking stick and hobbling after the other two, takes Samel’s hand and then Bova’s.

Cammish: Where’ve you been, boys? We’ve been waiting dinner for you so long the food’s gone cold!

Rand: Where are my brothers? Are they with you, mayr?

Bova: Sure they are, lad. They’ll be down the line a ways.

Rand starts to make his way along the trail in search of his returning brothers.

Belindeh: And Willard? Did you bring my grandson back to me, Jag Bova?

Bova: Yes, ma’am. And hale and hearty he is. In fact, yonder he comes—in search of you, I reckon!

Belindeh and Willard spot each other at the same moment and fall into each others’ arms.

Samel, soto voce, with a look at Bova” Thank God for small favors.

Bova: Getting all three of them back here alive and in one piece is more than a small favor, Sam.

Samel responds with an affirmative nod and a grim smile.

Cammish: Tough campaign, was it?

Bova: Yessir, Mister Cammish. That it was. You’ll be hearing about it soon. And all winter long, I expect.

Cammish: I’m sorry to learn that, Jag Bova. How many men did we lose? If you don’t mind my asking?

Bova: Thirty-eight. That’s the ones who made it into the other world. More are coming home wounded. They’ll take some time to heal. Those that ever do.

Cammish falls silent briefly, staring toward the village below.

Cammish: The boy has already ridden into town on his mule, a-spreadin’ the word that you men be coming up the road. Then he come back to greet you all, looking for his brothers. Listen to that racket down there!

From the distant valley, a sound of music and celebration reverberates up the hillside. The men toward the front who can hear it laugh and jostle. Bova and Semel also smile and look pleased.

Semel, grinning: The party’s started without us.

Fighting Man 1: Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.

Fighting Man 2: Little Mama’s a-callin’!

Men break ranks and begin to run or jog ahead, down the trail.

Bova: Get a grip on those clowns!

Semel, shouting: Whoa! Settle down there!

Several men give Semel puzzled glances.

Bova swaggers in front of the restless Men: “Now listen to that, boys! The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?

Gray-Bearded Fighter: What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?

Bova: Let’s play them a tune or three of our own. Let’s us get ourselves lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, call the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town!

Men nearby laugh.

Fighter (ironically): That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights.

Bova (deadpan straight): That it will. Into columns! Where are those pipers?

Men begin to assemble into rough columns while Bova moves bags from his war horse to a pack pony. Two men with small bagpipes approach, followed by two drummers and a fife player. Bova mounts his horse, and Semel hands a banner up to him and Bova secures it to his saddle. It waves in the light breeze. Pipers, fifer, and drummers strike up a bright marching tune.

They march down the hill in a celebratory mood, the wounded riding in supply wagons. As they approach the town, townspeople come up the road, dancing to the sound of fiddles, drums, and horns. Women, children, and old men stream into the band of weary, road-worn men. Shouts of joy and relief ring out as family members find their wandering men. A few call out names repeatedly, getting no response.

Bova soon finds Lieze, Ada and his three children, proceeding up the road amid a knot of followers and friends. The moment Lieze spots Bova, she runs through the crowd to greet him. Ada grabs Mandeh and Deke, murmuring an admonition to let their parents say hello before rushing their father. Bova looks like he would melt into his wife if he could. He sinks his face in her long chestnut hair, which she has allowed to flow loose for the occasion.

Bova: Oh, my God, Lieze, I’ve missed you so!

Lieze hugs him tightly.

Lieze: We’ve all been worried about you. Thank God you’re home and safe.

Bova kisses her face and then plants a passionate kiss on her lips. A couple of men nearby cheer this. Lieze blushes. Bova laughs, takes her hands and spins her around him exuberantly. Ada approaches, the three children in tow.

Ada: Welcome home, son!

Ada and Bova hug. The three children can no longer be restrained. Deke jumps on his father, who easily lifts him for a hug. Bova puts him down and greets Mandeh and Erysa with hugs, too. The two younger children chatter excitedly at him. Erysa’s manner is more contained; she has a natural dignity like her mother’s.

The party of townspeople and returning fighters enters the town, many gravitating toward a park and paved square in the town center. Bova and his family go with them.

Lieze: We have a wonderful dinner for you—a lovely lamb, and your favorite sweet winter squash, and two grand pecan pies… And we have so much to catch up on. Wait until you hear what the kids have been up to all summer!

Bova smiles and laughs in undisguised pleasure.

Bova: What’s this son of mine been up to now?

Ada: He’s started to learn his fencing. Lieze decided he’s getting big enough to start some lessons, so old [NAME] has been coming to the keep every few days to work with him. And he’s been helping Mandeh and Erysa practice with the bow.

Bova: Is that so? Well, those two could shoot a walnut off a tree. And as for you, Mister Deke, can you hold your own against this Mandeh?

Deke: O’course I can! I’m so good now, I bet I can beat you, Dad!

Bystanders laugh. Mandeh rolls her eyes heavenward.

§

Interestingly, the stage-play iteration of the scene that I wrote so unhappily came out with a great deal more detail and action, with new characters, and with some convincing forward motion.

Writing stage directions forces you to articulate details that one too easily elides in writing narrative, simply because a fiction writer may have the large picture in his head and so presume that everyone else can see it. In a stage or movie script, you have to provide enough specifics to allow a stage designer, a costume designer, a director, actors, and a whole slew of other folks to bring that picture vividly to life for the audience.

The momentum established by the genre switch allowed me to keep rolling into the next scene, which eventually will bring the mayr and mayreth (approximately the equivalent of a Middle English duke and duchess) Jag Bova and Lieze to the problem of how to address the large number of families whose men were lost during the summer’s disastrous engagement with the enemy.

Third draft:

Shortly after midday, Jag Bova’s bands of weary, road-worn men crested the pass through the low hills that rose above Rozebek Town. Birds whistled in the hilltop forest, and a squirrel, still busy stashing acorns and pine nuts for winter, chattered shrilly as the men hiked past them. A hawk drifted overhead, looking for all the world like idle curiosity brought it to watching the procession pass.

The autumn afternoon was clear and crisp beneath a sapphire sky, unblemished but for a few distant, fluffy clouds. Below lay farmlands, pasture, and the town of Rozebek, dominated by its mayr’s keep. In the orchards, apple and walnut trees had already dropped their leaves, but here and there a maple or a pear clung to its scarlet and gold.

When he saw the village spread out before them, Bova felt his heart rise. Narrow lanes led out from the town plaza like spokes on a wagon wheel, the spaces between them filled with stone houses built four and six and sometimes even eight to a compound. Huddled together around common walls, the dwellings gained a little extra shelter from winter’s deepest cold. And there, wrapped within the village, stood his own home, Rozebek Keep. Its high defensive fortifications were built of local gray stone, as was his private family compound’s tower that rose above the stokhed walls.

Alone among the Okan aristocracy’s fortifications, the Mayr of Rozebek’s keep formed a part of its village. The people’s homes came right up to the moat, making the keep an island in a small lake of human activity. Usually a kubnath’s or a mayr’s keep and dwelling stood atop a low rise anywhere from half a mile to two miles from its village. This difference pleased Jag Bova. If anyone disapproved, they hadn’t ventured to complain.

A fieldstone watch tower stood at the height of the pass. Three villagers came out of the door at ground level to greet the arriving fighters. The first, a wiry youth barely more than a boy and not quite a young man, fairly bounced up the road.

“Mister Mayr! Mr. Samel! God bless you.” He bounded over and shook first Bova’s hand, then Samel’s.

The men at the front of the line pushed forward, pleased to see the first of their kin and friends that they’d laid eyes on in five months.

“Would that be Rand the cooper’s boy?” Someone said. Another laughed in unfeigned delight. “You’ve grown a good three inches!”

Shortly behind the lad came a tall, lank, and wrinkled woman clad in rough-cut homespun pants and shirt, her grey hair straggling out beneath a knitted woolen cap. She advanced to Bova with arms extended and wrapped him in a hearty hug.

“Thank God you’re home,” she exclaimed. “Thank God!”

“Sister Belindeh,” Samel greeted her, accepting the next round of handshakes and crushes. “You’ll be doing guard duty now?”

An even more grizzled man hobbled after her, supported by a walking stick. “Where have you been, boys?” the old fellow exclaimed. “We’ve been waiting dinner for you so long the food’s gone cold!”

A ripple of subdued laughter murmured through the men within earshot.

“Where are my brothers?” Rand asked. “Are they with you, mayr?”

“Sure they are, lad” Bova replied. “They’ll be down the line a ways.” Rand made his way up the trail to find his returning relatives.

“And Willard? Did you bring my grandson back to me, Jag Bova?” Belindeh asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bova said. “And hale and hearty he is. In fact, yonder he comes—in search of you, I reckon.”

Belindeh and Willard spotted each other in the same moment and fell into each others’ arms.

Samel glanced at Bova and said quietly, “Thank God for small favors.”

“Getting all three of them back here alive and in one piece is more than a small favor, Sam.”

His monja nodded and smiled grimly.

“Tough campaign, was it?” the old man asked, overhearing this.

“Yessir, Mister Cammish,” Bova agreed. “That it was. You’ll be hearing about it soon enough. And all winter long, I expect.”

“I’m sorry to learn that, Jag Bova,” said Cammish. “How many men did we lose? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Thirty-eight. That’s the ones who made it into the other world. More are coming home wounded. They’ll take some time to heal. Those that ever do.”

Cammish fell silent briefly, staring toward the village below. Then he said, “The boy has already ridden into town on his mule, a’spreadin’ the word that you men be climbing up the hill. Then he come back to greet you all, looking for his brothers. Listen to that racket down there!”

A distant sound wafted up the hillside: music. Horns and fiddles, drums and tambourines, whistles and ghitters and recorders and pipes rose a merry clamor down in the village.

Semel, Bova’s monja, grinned when he heard the racket. “The party’s started without us,” he said.

One of the other men overheard and added, “Let’s get our asses down there! Don’t want to miss any more than we have to.”

“Little Mama’s a-callin’,” another voice exclaimed. Here and there, men broke out of line and started to jog ahead.

“Get a grip on those clowns,” Bova said to Semel.

“Whoa! Settle down there!” Semel shouted. A few marchers, rowdy and not inclined to settle anywhere just then, gave him uncertain glances.

“Now listen to that, boys!” Bova hollered. His large presence commanded immediate attention. “The folks have brought out the band for us. What d’you say we return the favor?”

“What’ve you got in mind, Mister Mayr?” a grizzled fellow on the sidelines hollered back.

“Let’s play them a tune or three of our own,” Bova replied. “Let’s us get ourselves lined up here like respectable gents, and Semel, get the pipers and the drummers and let’s pipe the men to town.”

A ripple of laughter washed over the company closest to Bova and Semel. “That’ll give the girls something to remember through the winter nights,” someone remarked, boldly sarcastic.

“That it will,” Bova said. “Into columns! Where are those pipers?”

The band began to fall into rough order, and shortly two men with small bagpipes, a couple of drummers, and a fife player gathered at the head of the company. Meanwhile, Bova lifted bags of gear off his charger, loaded them on a pack pony, and climbed into the saddle. Semel scouted up the company’s banner, unfurled it from its pole, and handed it up to Bova, who secured it to his saddle, where it waved cheerfully in the crystalline air.

§

Another draft to come. As you can see, a fair amount more is already in draft, ready to be transposed out of script format into narrative, description, dialogue, and whatnot.

This strategy was time-consuming. But it worked. And I suspect it’s no more time-consuming than sitting for minute after minute and hour after hour staring at an empty page or a blank screen.

If you’re worth your salt as a writer, you’ll write several drafts anyway. Why shouldn’t one of the drafts be in a different genre?

Trying (& Failing) to Get Back into the Writing Swing…

So some weeks back (make that months?) I decided to give myself a little break from the Ella story. That break morphed into a brake…as in dead stop. How can I express how much I’d like to and yet would not like to get back into the writing swing of things?

Today, for example…. Okay, said I, Let us create a SCHEDULE. There’s nothing like a list, nothing like a scheduled set of tasks, to make yourself do things, right?

Lordie! I can’t even work up the energy to start making any such schedule. So tired am I, at 11:31 a.m., that I can hardly hold my head up. All I want to do is bolt down lunch and go back to bed.

What have I done today?

Well…

  • Up at 4 a.m..
  • Read incoming email, social media notices, national & local news
  • Out the door at 5 for a two-mile walk with the dog
  • Fed the dog
  • Fed the birds
  • Fixed breakfast; ate same while watching dove feeding frenzy and reading The Economist
  • Washed two weeks’ worth of laundry
  • Cleaned and did chemical balance maintenance on the pool.
  • Watered all the plants in prep for today’s predicted 114-degree heat.
  • Caught up with email correspondence.
  • And now am waiting for the frozen shrimp to defrost so I can fix the mid-day meal, after which I will probably crash into the sack for a lengthy siesta — about the only way anyone can survive a low-desert July afternoon, even with the AC and a roomful of fans running at full blast.

The best I’ve done so far is to reflect that part of my problem with Ella is that the Ella story has no plot. It was, after all, enough of a challenge to present two stories running in tandem, one in real time in one as flashback. The matter, however, is much complicated by the fact that one of these story lines does have a plot (sort of) and one is pretty amorphous.

What IS a plot? Let us discuss that in another post: I’m too tired just now to build a reasonably clear explanation of what plot is and how it works. So…later, with that. As with all things in my life just now, apparently.

So yes: I do know approximately how the 12 stages of plot direct Ella’s experience on the alien moon of Zaitaf. Except that her story is rather more complicated than Vogler’s formula for genre story.

Therein may lay the problem: possibly the plot is too complex. Possibly I need to rethink it and simplify the action. Maybe progress is being blocked because the brain just does NOT want to do the work required to choreograph the characters through that dance.

What I need to do, I guess, is fit the amorphous into the…morphous: into a plot outline that can direct the action. This will relieve me of having to think so hard about where things are going and how the story unfolds. All that will left to do is…well…unfold.

Videlicet:

Arrrghh! Lunch-time!!!!

Progress Being Made

As you’ll recall, if you visit here now and again, awhile back my creative schooner ran aground on the shoals of ennui. I decided to try a new tack: write the backstory for a character that kept pushing herself to the forefront of the imaginative stage.

This scheme is working well, to my surprise. So well, in fact, that I’m beginning to wonder if the story is really about Ella, second-in-command to the Kaïna Rysha’s overseer, and not at all about her highness, Rysha Delamona, described by said overseer in a moment of impatience as ruler of “This, That, and the Other, not to Exclude the Whole Fucking Universe.”

I had conceived of this tale as an “Upstairs” story, one that would follow the exploits of an imperial aristocracy challenged not only by its own divisive intrigues but by the appearance of a mysterious alien entity.

But maybe in fact it’s a “Downstairs” story, following the exploits of a hard-bitten interstellar working and criminal class struggling to survive in the context of an aggressive imperial culture. Maybe the interesting stuff has little to do with the privileged, the wealthy, and the hereditary elite.

So far, we have about 6800 words, five chapteroids of copy that consist largely of flashbacks occurring while Ella is having a spate of insomnia. The next scene is clear in its author’s mind and likely to roll right along.

If this keeps on, I’ll end up with a whole story about Ella, Dorin, and the “Downstairs” crew, probably with rather little characterization or story-telling about the elite. That’s why I think maybe it’s a whole different story than the one originally envisioned.

At this rate, she was never going to get to sleep. Leaving the light off – none was needed, after all, nor did she want to wake anyone – she slipped out from under the covers, pulled on a robe, and padded barefoot down the cool stone hallway to the side entry at the far end of the women’s quarters. The door was alarmed, but she had a key and a code, which she used to let herself outside.

Zaitaf [Varnis’s largest moon] cast her argentine glow across the landscape that spread out before Ella’s restless gaze. What a thing, she reflected. Who would have imagined she would ever see such a place, pastoral and only half-peopled, much less live in it? Monochromatic beneath the moon’s platinum mantle, the broad pastures, the sturdy manor house – conservative but large and commanding – the gardens, the domesticated woods, and off in the distance the low mountains from which Skyhill took its name glowed like a painting limned in ebony ink on silver. Lovely by daylight, this evening it took her breath away. It wanted to fill her with love for the place. But it also stole other things away from her: her self, her loves, her past.

She gazed up at Zaitaf and wondered which of those gray patches on its face was Ethra. Could a person see Ethra at all without a magnifying lens? And . . . how was it possible that she’d been here almost 30 years? That she’d spent almost ten on Zaitaf?

Djitti had died a couple years after Ella was brought to Skyhill, recruited as Dorin’s second in overseeing the estate’s staff. Her daughter, now the Kaïna, was ten at the time. Not quite twenty when her father was assassinated. Five years Kaïna now, Rysha was.

How did all that happen between yesterday and today?

Bhotil [overseer on Ethra, the colony on Zaitaf] would be in his 90s now, if he’d lived. He had been good to her, helped her work her way up from the resort’s laundry to dispatching and then to supervising staff. She missed him.

Every now and again she missed Bhotil. Now and again. But she missed Vighdi—her lover, her boss—every day.

Vighdi, shining bright in the sky. What was she doing now? Was she still on Zaitaf? Hell, was she even still living at all? Ella had no way of knowing, no way of finding out.

“Madame.”

She jumped, startled out of her reverie. At the door, watching her with a half-smile, stood Dorin [overseer for the Kaïna’s estate, and Ella’s immediate boss].

“It’s after curfew. What are you doing out here?”

“Not much,” she said. “Just having a hard time getting to sleep. You, too?”

“Well, no. But opening the door sets off an alarm on my desk.”

“Oh, dear. I’m sorry. I thought my key would open it without waking you.”

“Well – at least it doesn’t wake the dead an all their kindred.”

“Can’t win, hm?”

“Never.”

He stepped outside onto the landing with her and stood gazing at the silver-plated landscape.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” he remarked.

“Oh, my, yes.”

Dorin stood quietly, his attention taken by the glowing scene. The moonlight picked up the silver in his hair and, to Ella’s eye, made him part of the show.

“So,” he said after a moment or two, “what’s keeping you awake tonight, Ella? Something on your mind?”

Ah. The talk-to-me gambit. She’d had the same steward’s training: social work and counseling. Maybe it was unkind of her, though, to suspect a “gambit.” Overseer, he was, but he’d also been a good enough friend to her.

She shrugged. “I dunno. Different things, I guess.”

He was quiet for a moment. The wait-’em-out gambit. She gave in. “The Darl business, I suppose. It’s just…a little much.”

“Upset you to see him suffering like that?”

“I suppose, yeah.” He waited some more. “No,” she added. “It’s not anything we haven’t all been through.”

“Most of us,” he agreed.

“When you think about it…well, hell. Dorin. You and I worked like animals to get where we are. This guy comes along, this guy, and he just drops out of the cooker into the dormitory at Skyhill? I mean…how does that happen?”

A dubious glance. “When did you start expecting life to be fair?” He actually sounded a little surprised. And yes. It probably was…out of character. The man could spot bullshit a mile away.

“Not recently,” she admitted. He smiled distantly, gazing at the silvered landscape. At length she spoke into his silence. “It’s just that it annoys me. This is Bintje’s doing. If she hadn’t gotten herself knocked up, we wouldn’t have to be dealing with a new slave, and the paperwork and the damn blacksuits in our faces and the training and the headaches that go with someone fresh out of the cooker [a particularly excruciating type of punishment marking the transition between conviction for a crime and a lifetime of servitude].”

“Well. It’s not Bintje’s fault she got pregnant. She had the shot. You saw her get it. And you know the stuff doesn’t work a hundred percent of the time.”

“Okay, so Bintje brings home a belly, and the mistress decides…what? She’s going to buy a doctor for her? Why? The place is crawling with perfectly fine midwives.”

Why, indeed?

I have no idea. Who knows what mysteries lurk in the hearts of absolute rulers?

Procrastination as Creative Strategy

Over at Quora, an inquiring mind asked about how one deals with procrastination. The correspondent confessed to being a Ph.D. student, and so I assume he or she was worrying about the struggle to write seminar papers and the dissertation.

You don’t have to be an aspiring academic to confront this predicament. Most writers find themselves putting off the job, from time to time. Sometimes all the time.

It’s so common that I’ve come to think “procrastination” is actually a creative strategy. You need to take time away from the physical and psychological process of writing. Sometimes you really do need to get up and go away from your desk.

New insights come as a result of looking away, as it were, from the task at hand. At night, you can see a faint star with your peripheral vision – by glancing slightly away from it – when you couldn’t see it by peering at it straight on. Similarly, with a creative project you may develop insight and strengthen your grasp on the subject by looking away from it for awhile.

So, instead of fighting this phenomenon, it’s better to build time into your routine to accommodate it. Schedule time to go do something else.

Also, set aside a short period at an appointed time each working day (not necessarily seven days a week), to do nothing but work on your writing project. This can mean research, thinking, outlining, and revising as well as writing new material. Insist that the people around you let you have that time uninterrupted – no getting up to tend to the kids or water the plants or answer the phone. Assure loved ones and friends that you will be with them at the end of this period. It doesn’t have to be hours at a time: in fact, it’s better to keep it brief. Forty-five minutes or an hour will do, at least at the outset. The period may (or may not) grow as you get used to it.

You’d be surprised how fast you can get through a project using this strategy.

Image: DepositPhotos, © stuartmiles

Writer’s Block

Here’s a little essay I wrote back in the day when I was a working journalist. Camping in the bottom of Arizona’s wild Aravaipa Canyon, I was on assignment for what was then the country’s largest regional magazine.

Writer’s Block

A starry blanket covers us. Tom lies in a hammock strung between the branches of a gnarled mesquite tree, Virgil in his hiker’s tent, and I beneath the open sky. The men fell asleep as soon as our candle guttered out, but, as usual, I am slow to sleep in the wild, my mind aswarm with the images, adventures, and talk of the day.

Stars are about all we need as bedcovers. This morning Debbie remarked that her thermometer hit 105 yesterday. It was easily that hot as we started down the trail,and beneath a buttermilk sky we were all dripping before we even reached the creek. Here at Horse Camp, just above the confluence of Virgus Canyon, the heat softened a little after sunset, and now as I lie atop my sleeping bag I am not uncomfortable, except for the ache in my knee and hip brought on by a fall in the mud.

That’s Cepheus, the rectangle of stars with a couple of arms sticking out and the Milky Way flowing through it, framed between the cliffs and the lace-like canopy of mesquite leaves overhead.

A bat flies past, searching for bugs—I shoo a mosquito in its direction.

What, I wonder, am I doing here?

How am I going to do the job I was sent to do?

A single breath of air sighs through the still, dark canyon. Crickets sing in the brush around us, and some small night creature trills like a bird. A plane flies over—Aravaipa Canyon lies beneath a flight path, and a concatenation of jet noise echoes through this place.

The problem, I realize, is not in the story but in me. I’m no longer sure I want to continue writing. Why this should be so, I do not understand. But it is so, and it has erected a barrier as solid as those rock walls glowing silver in the starlight.

 ***

A blue starpoint of light twinkles in the brush behind Virgil’s tent. Some kind of glowworm, perhaps.

Tom says he saw fireflies in here on an earlier trip from the east end, but I’ve never seen one, not here in Arizona.

We hiked in here over four types of paving:

  • loose, polished river rocks in dry floodplain;
  • loose, polished, slimy river rocks underwater;
  • ankle-deep mud with the lubricating power of axle grease;
  • and ankle-deep sand.

That sand turns into a film of ball bearings the instant you set your foot on a rock.

Attack horseflies the size of F-16s lie in wait for the warm-blooded, as do swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. We kept an eye out for rattlesnakes and tried not to do anything stupid like putting a hand under a nice, cool rock where one might be resting.

Deep in the gorge, lion-colored cliffs rose 1,000 feet above us, mottled lichen-green, studded with agave spires. Saguaro forests, cholla, prickly pear, and barrel cactus cover the high, buff palisades down to the wine-red ryholite streambed. Clouds of butterflies blew in the air like autumn leaves, and red and blue dragonflies cruised the still pools.

Tentworms festooned young cottonwoods with silken filaments like angel hair; thumb-sized toads speckled with ruby spots hid in the rocks, invisible until they moved.

Vail, Buzan, Brandenburg, Kilberg, Zapata, Martinez, Wood, White, Hartman. They ran cattle and farmed—citrus, peaches, pecans—and from our perspective lived an idyll.

Louise Ruddick Hartman: “For two years we worked and played. “We lived outdoors under a big cedar tree and moved into the tent only when it rained. . . . Around every corner adventure was waiting for us, and opportunity kept banging at the door. We tried not to miss anything, nor did we.”

Clovis and Cochise, Hohokam, Papago, Sobaipuri, Apache: Gone. Dead and gone before Louise Hartman came along. Dead and gone so that she could come along. Camp Grant stood just down the river, site of a slaughter so perfidious that even the invaders’ own people cried atrocity.

Starlit clouds pale as spirits lick the canyon rim. I hope it doesn’t rain. But at last sleep comes for a time, brief oblivion.

A brilliant half-moon has begun to rise when I wake; through the branches it casts spectral blotches on our packs and the huge downed log Tom converted into a kitchen.

Again the problem of the story presents itself.

Why do I still follow this line of work? One old friend would have an answer. But even as the moon glows down on us here, it shines through the window of the hospital room where he lies ill, at this moment dying.

He represents a school of elegance and precision that, moderns tell us, has no place in our time, this time of dwindling literacy and growing apathy. When he is gone, something more than a friend will be lost. A part of America’s cultural and intellectual prime will die with him.

Moonlight ghosts over the cliffs. The trees whisper.

What is wrong with the story is that it is swamping in a tide of grief—not just for him, but for my people and all that we have forfeited.

When next I wake the moon is straight overhead near the constellation of Cassiopeia. The space boxed in by the stark, pinnacled walls is filled with silver light. Mesquite leaves silhouetted against the shining sky look like black filigree.

 

The evening’s conversation replays in my head. Somehow it had turned from the grandeur of the universe to Sedona’s New-Age vortexes to our kids’ education to the times of our lives, and we agreed that now, in middle age, is the best.

Neither Tom nor Virgil said much that was profound, nor did they mean to. As we gathered in the circle of light cast by our candle, an old friendship was cemented and a new one begun.

While the candle held back the night, we shared an unspoken sense of human continuity, with each other and with those who came before.

* * *

Dawn seeps pearlescent down the reaches of Horse Camp Canyon, past the bouldered grottoes of Virgus Canyon, up the gurgling course of Aravaipa Creek and into our refuge.

A canyon wren’s melodic tremolo descends kamikaze-style as though the bird were diving off a cliff:

CHEE-wee–wee wee-wee-wee

Eighteen turkey vultures ride the clear eddies over the rim; only half that many watched as Virgil and I trudged into camp yesterday evening. In a few minutes, Tom will brew us fresh coffee and sweeten it with cocoa and our human day will begin.

There is much to say.

 

What to Do about Writer’s Block? Part 4

Another idea on how to get over writer's block!This is the fourth and last — and maybe the strangest — suggestion in a series of suggestions for dealing with writer’s block.

Have a conversation with one of your characters. Imagine that he or she can see you and is persuaded to speak with you, and ask for an explanation of some aspect of the person’s experience, thinking, or belief that you don’t understand.

[The time-traveling writer:] So. Would you tell me what’s bothering you?

[The protagonist:] I’d have to sit down and have a drink and think it over. [he  looks at her reflectively. he’s considering the possibility.]

Have some of this. [she offers him her boda]

[he takes a swig] That’s very nice. Smooth. What is it?

Just red wine. It’s from…the south.

Ah. They do make some good liquor down there.

Well, take a seat and have some more.

[he thinks for another second, then decides to accept. he sits on a rock next to her and sips at the wine. then he passes the boda back to her.]

Care for some imp? [he pulls a pipe out of his vest pocket and begins to pack it with herb.]

Is it very strong?

No, this is mild stuff. Daytime smoke, hm? [he picks up a twig, lights it in the campfire, and puts it to his pipe.]

[she watches as he lights the pipe and inhales deeply. he smiles, holding his breath, and passes it to her. she takes a toke and hands it back to him.]

So. What’s eating me? I don’t know. Everything and nothing.

Does it have to do with the fight?

Of course. I don’t like to lose my men. And — well, Robin, that was pretty…pretty bad. Little Guelito, too — just a boy. What a… Well, it all seems so wasted.

There’s more to it than that?

Yeah, I suppose.

Like what?

I don’t know, woman. It’s hard for me to put my mind to it. I can’t really…it’s like I don’t have the words to explain it.

Well, would you try?

I don’t know. Nothing seems quite right to me any more. At the base. It’s as though everything that we…all the reasons that we do things? They’re wrong. Or they really aren’t reasons. Or there really aren’t any reasons at all. Do you understand?

Sort of. Like what reasons? What reasons that you do things, and why are they wrong?

Why are they wrong? For the same reason that there aren’t any ghosts. They’re just not true. I don’t think. . .I don’t think that a god who wants us to kill everyone around us, who wants to take our Brez — his son, hm? — to kill him at the end of a few years of leading us, I don’t think that’s much of a god. I mean, what kind of a god would do that? And what kind of a god would let people — no, make people — suffer the way they do? Why would a god give us sickness and pain before we die? Make us die in terrible agony? It just doesn’t…you know, I don’t think I can believe in a thing like that.

Oh.

Does that frighten you?

No. I just thought… Well, I thought that was just the way your people explained things. It’s a pretty harsh world, after all — so there must be a harsh god behind it.

Well, it’s not a very good explanation, is it.

I don’t think so. But I’m not one of your people.

No. I can see that.

So. You can’t buy the Hengliss version of god. Can you buy that there’s a god at all?

I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be much logic behind things, when you look at the world…that way.

No. It’s chaos. They say there’s order in chaos, though.

Who says that?

Some people who… Well, they died a long time ago. And whatever they said, it’s been forgotten. What about the Espanyo idea of god? Does that make any more sense to you?

Nope. Less. You know what they think.

Not really.

It’s superstition. All the silliest blather. Ghosts and saints and three-headed deities in singing chariots and angels and devils — my god!

But maybe what the Hengliss think is superstition, too.

That’s right.

Hm. What about the Udanites? Do you know anything about their belief?

Yeah. It’s…different. But different doesn’t make it right. In fact, maybe the fact that they’re all different makes them all wrong.

I see. Is that the main thing that’s bothering you? A crisis of faith, as it were?

What does that mean?

That none of your religious beliefs — the things you were brought up to believe — seem to fit any more.

Ah. Yes. That’s part of it.

But is it the main thing?

I don’t know.

Nary a word of this fantasy exchange ever made it into the novel’s narrative. But it informed my understanding of the character, and that understanding drove the narrative in ways that showed the character acting on or questioning his beliefs. Taking time to write something that wasn’t part of the novel but let the character speak for himself, off the record, made it a lot easier to move forward with the narrative.

This and the ideas suggested in my last three posts are only a few of the many strategies a writer may use to deflect writer’s block, revive the creative energy, and get on with the story.

What’s your weirdest or silliest strategy to deal with writer’s block?

Writer’s Block, Part 1
Writer’s Block, Part 2
Writer’s Block, Part 3

What to Do about Writer’s Block? Part 3

Interesting way to get help with writer's block.Here’s a third suggestion for coping for writer’s block — part of a four-part discussion.

Describe the setting or action from the point of view of one of the characters, not necessarily the one whose point of view is represented in the scene under construction. Example:

Ottavio Ombertín had never seen so many tents as filled the glen where the raiding bands were based. Shoved along by the Hengliss man, he passed several tunnel-like affairs covered in hide and canvas. Here and there stood smaller dome-shaped shelters, six or eight feet across. Horses grazed complacently, hobbled or penned inside a circle of parked wagons. A few men lounged or puttered near smoldering campfires. Some greeted the Hengliss with calls that sounded like musta qué or ku’na. Pine needles sighed. A pair of jays commented on their passage. Somewhere far off young voices shouted and bantered as a group of friends threw a ball around a makeshift ha-lo court.

Tavio scarcely noticed these things. It didn’t occur to him to remark on the gathering of tents. He no longer registered much, except for the screaming.

They stopped before one of the domes. The Englo said it was his lodge and sat Tavio down on a flat rock near the fire ring, which flanked a second lodge nearby.

Then the man turned away, picked up a pot, filled it from a bucket, and hung it off an iron hook staked over the fire. From a canvas sack, he pulled a couple fistfuls of grain, which he sifted through his fingers into the heating water.

None of this, either, was observed very closely by Tavio. He huddled on the stone, his eyes cast down. He saw that his right foot was bleeding, but oddly, he felt no pain. He put his hands over his ears to block out the sound of the screams. Yet when he did, he could still hear them, Tisha especially, her voice shrilling a note he had never heard before and then shrieking for her mama. A shadow fell across the ground. The Hengliss was standing over him.

You may never use this material. Or you may use some of it, either whole cloth or much massaged. But it will give you some insight into or purchase on what’s going on, and that may be all you need to put your Jeep back in gear.

Have you written passages that you never used in your fiction, for the sole purpose of clarifying characterization, setting, backstory, or the like? How did it work for you?

Writer’s Block, Part 1
Writer’s Block, Part 2

What to Do about Writer’s Block? Part 2

Tips on getting over writer's blockThis is the second installment of a four-part discussion of ways to handle writer’s block. The first post appeared yesterday.

Remember that gold is a soft metal. Your golden words are malleable — NOT graven in granite!

Regard what you’ve written as draft at all times. Never stop revising. And be aware that it’s a lot easier to revise and rework than it is to choke out brand-new creative content. Just get it down on paper. Or on disk. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Not the first time around, not the second time around, not the third time around.

Knowing that you can always jimmy the copy, add to the copy, cut the copy, totally change the copy makes it a lot easier to get something out.

Just write it, and don’t worry if it isn’t perfect.

Chapter 1, Take 1 (or Take 2 something like that):

It should feel good, Kay thought. Watching this happen should feel good. He ought to feel back-slapping, hollering, falling-down-drunk happy, or at least for God’s sake like raising a swig of whiskey to the moment.

He and his cousin, Mitch―Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos―stood atop a promontory, just a low butte, actually, about a hundred feet tall, and surveyed the battle’s aftermath. Fallon, still clad in his leather chest armor, saw them climbing up here. He followed and joined them a few minutes after they stopped at the bluff’s edge. When he reached the two, he shook Kay’s hand, punched Mitch on the shoulder, congratulated them on a fine day’s work.

And the men had done a day’s work. Together the three looked out over the scene. Hengliss allies―Okan and A’oan marching under the Okan brez, Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel―had taken the town in three weeks flat. It was an incredible feat. Roksan, the principal city of their principal enemy, should have been impregnable. But they had shown it was not. Now the men, scruffy irregulars, most of them, pressed into duty by the obligations of their betters and not because they knew much about soldiering, spread over the plain before the burning town’s gate. No one down there seemed to suffer any qualms. Their noise reached the hilltop as unruly hubbub like a huge outdoor party gone too far in drink. Men laughed and shouted, a few surviving women squealed as the boys had their fun with them, horses and wagons rattled around. Guys compared plunder, traded booty―some had set up open-air markets to trade or sell the loot they’d carried from the city before the heat pushed them out.

A brown and gray pillar twisted upward toward white clouds that galloped before a chasing wind, and Kay knew the smart breeze would keep those fires going until they had done their job. The place would burn to the ground before they smoldered out. The flames would leave a pile of ashes, maybe a few blackened rafters, charred bricks. And scorched bones.

Fal, wiry and saturnine, his dark beard and mustache trimmed as if to cut down wind resistance, offered his boda to the two older men. They accepted the liquor cheerfully. The drink passed between them while they gazed at the scene below.

“Beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Mitchel remarked.

“Oh, yeah,” Kay said. “That it is.”

“Must do your heart good.”

“You bet.”

“How long has it been for you?” Fal asked.

“Twenty-eight years,” Kay replied.

Chapter 1, Take 5 or 10:

Fallon Mayr of Cheyne Wells rarely gave himself over to speculation. If on this good day you had asked him how the Hengliss tribes came to see themselves as one being, a living organism whose limbs and body and soul formed a single piece—or even if they did—he would have laughed. He would direct your attention to the pillar of smoke twisting skyward where Roksan burned, and he would turn your question obliquely around. He would ask you, then, had they not, the bands of Okan and A’o fighting as one under the Brez Lhored Kubna of Grisham Lekvel, had they not done a fine thing?

He passed the lambskin flask that was making the rounds among several companions to Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek. Bova, a chunky flaxen-bearded northerner whose heft made Fal’s long, wiry frame look slight by comparison, lifted the boda in a friendly salute, swigged its unrefined contents as though he were taking a deep drink of water, and passed it to Kristof Mayr of Oshin.

“That was one hot maneuver you two pulled inside them gates,” Robin Mayr of O’a remarked to Fal. A slender, muscular young man with a smooth chestnut-colored beard, he accepted the boda from Kristof and lifted it vaguely in Fal’s direction.

“Mostly Kay’s idea,” Fal said. He shrugged as though he’d had little to do with the swath they’d ripped through the defenders in the long chaos after the Hengliss had breached the enemy city’s entrance.

“Bull!” said Jag Bova. “He couldn’t have done it by himself. And I’ll tell you—when he takes them kind of ideas into his head, I’m sure as hell glad I’m not the one who has to fight on his flank.”

Fallon laughed with the others. But he was glad, too, that it wasn’t Bova. He wouldn’t have traded his place at Kay’s side for any honor the brez could dream up.

“He had his reasons for going after the bastards like that,” Kristof remarked.

“Must have felt damned good,” Robin added. “If it’d been me, I’d have tried to squash every cockroach I could catch.”

“Yeah. Well, we just about did that,” Fal said. “Not too many of ’em left in there.”

Even where they were standing, a mile away, heat from the fires burning the sacked Espanyo city reached them. It took the chill off the cool air that drifted down the distant snow-covered Achpie and Serra peaks flanking the wide bottomland along the Wakeen Ribba.

“Ain’t none of ’em gonna crawl out of that place no more, no how,” Robin agreed. He passed the drink back to Rozebek.

Bova raised the flask to that, and they all murmured their appreciation of Robin’s whiskey-laced profundity.

“There goes your kubna with his cousin now,” said Bova. “Looks like they want to get a view of the doings.”

By “your kubna” he meant Kaybrel Kubna of Moor Lek, the man to whom Fal, Robin, and Kristof owed their first loyalty. The cowndee of Rozebek belonged to the house of Puns, and Jag Bova served its kubna, Rikad of Puns.

They watched Kaybrel and Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos stride through the festive troops gathered on the plain before the burning city. Kay was carrying his leather helmet in one hand, his silver-streaked hair flowing loose around his shoulders. To Fal’s eye, he looked tired, but the others didn’t see that. The two kubnas cleared the mob and headed toward a low butte that rose above what had a few hours earlier been a battlefield. They disappeared around the side of the promontory, seeking the gentle rise up the hill’s backside.

“How long has it been for him?” Robin asked.

“What? Since Moor Lek fell?” Fallon read meaning into Robin’s question. “I think he said…no, it was the kubnath who said that. Maire said it was twenty-eight years ago this spring.”

“Twenty-eight years! She wasn’t even born then, eh?”

“Neither were the rest of us,” Fal replied, and what he said applied to everyone there but Jag Bova, the only man among them to have reached his early thirties.

Lordie! I must’ve been listening to Willie and Toby singin’ Whiskey for My Men when I scribbled that version.

Sometimes if you can’t move forward with the new writing, going back and revising material you already have will help. Notice how radically different Take 2 is from the first effort: a different character’s point of view, an entirely different set of characters with the protagonist taken off center stage, facts presented in a slightly different context through the mouths of different characters, and a different kind of characterization of a central figure.

I’ve found that every time you rewrite a scene from beginning to end, it improves. Often, even very small changes — a turn of phrase here, a gesture there, a detail or a word choice — have a large effect.

Have you had that experience?

Writer’s Block? What to Do?? Part I

Writer's block -- what to do?Students and scribbling friends have occasionally asked, over the years, for ideas on how to handle writer’s block. It’s not something I had much problem with, at least not as a working journalist, and so I have to confess to emanating a few glib answers:

• Visualize your byline on the “Pay to the Order of” line on the paycheck.
• Imagine your editor’s response when you call to say you’ll be late on deadline: “Bye!” Once and for all.
• Write a letter to your mom describing all the things you learned on assignment. The story will write itself after that.
• Go play with the cat.
• Pour yourself a (glass of wine, cup of coffee, can of soda).
• Go for a walk.
• Quit with the drama already and get down to work!

Those of us who write on deadline for pay rarely suffer from “writer’s block” — there’s no time for it — and so for years I doubted it was for real. But once I began to write novels, I realized that fiction is one heckuva lot harder to write than nonfiction. So much so, in fact, that you really do reach impasses where you know what you want to say (you think) and you think you know what your characters are gonna do and you can envision the time and the place and the action but it just won’t come out in words!

Disturbing. What to do when this happens?

It’s occurred a number of times during the writing of the Fire-Rider novels, and especially in Book II, which is in progress and which carries the characters and the action home from the battlefield and into new, more sophisticated psychological and moral territory than they traversed during the swashbuckling Book I. I’ve actually been reduced to having to think, of all the despair-inducing shockers.

Several chapters are written in the first person, from the point of view of a character named Hapa Cottrite, whose journals, in the series’ larger conceit, are the source of all we know about the people of the dark ages from which he writes. Cottrite: he flummoxes me. He’s smarter than me. His insights are sharp and closely observed. But he’s an outsider, and I’m not sure how much he understands, how much he intuits, and how much he could be expected to misinterpret or even to know nothing about. Meanwhile, because he’s an outsider, the other characters’ responses to him are multifarious and sometimes unpredictable. I’m almost scared of Cottrite.

None of this is conducive to fluent writing.

Nothing makes it easy, but a few strategies have come to hand. Let’s start with one today, and move on to others in the coming posts.

Enter notes, no matter how fragmentary, at the bottom of a chapter or scene. Use these as cues to help jump-start the narrative and keep it rolling around.

The current problematic scene has Lhored, the local boss of bosses (he’s the equivalent of a medieval king), visiting the widow and two sister wives of one of his followers (Mitchel), who was murdered while catting around a town they visited after a disastrous battle with the enemy. She is a potentate in her own right; her young adult son is a chip off his father’s block, not an altogether flattering comparison.

Lhored of Grisham Lekvel and two of Mitch’s followers arrive at Mitch’s castle; word of Mitch’s death has preceded them. Braced to answer her questions and to make some difficult explanations, they offer their sympathies. But…but…THEN what? And where is Mitch’s son?

She nodded patiently. “Let’s sit down.” She waved us all toward the fine leather and wool chairs and benches that populated the hall. Lhored was directed into a comfortable armchair and I was seated nearby. The three women pulled up smaller chairs to make a conversation circle around Lhored, the two mayrs, and me. Food and drink appeared, borne by two [women who look working class] and a young boy, and we were all served, solid stoneware dishes a luxury after our weeks of eating off tin plates.

“You’ve heard the news we bring,” Lhored began.

“Yes. We heard before Mak’s men reached Rittamun. One of the outlying herdsmen brought word a couple of days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She let this rest briefly. “They say he didn’t die in battle. Can you…will you tell us how this happened?”

Lhored looked pained. This, he had said more than once, was the conversation he dreaded, and here it was upon him. “Bett,” he said, “we don’t really know.”

Zzzzzz…. Okay, you can’t be exciting every moment. Move on, move on!

Notes at the end of the file:

[what is going on here? What is Hapa observing? Move forward into some other part of this chapter and then come back here. This piece is going nowhere!]

What’s going on here? Darned if I know. Start writing some other part of the chapter? That’s a possibility. Then this comes to mind:

[Lhored is about to speak when Lenn shows up. Lenn is surly, aggressive, and obnoxious. He demands to know what happened to Mitch. What was he doing out there alone. Then he demands to know why they let him go out alone and D says he tried to go along and was rejected & the others say that’s so. They work their way around to saying HC was sent as a gift from the seeyo; they’d probly better tell them about the elaborate funeral and the loot first.]

 All right. Let’s try that. It’s better than working, anyway. I guess. {sigh}

The front door opened, letting in a beam of light, and someone was heard passing through the vestibule. A tall, slender young man, about seventeen and still beardless, entered the hall. Dressed in work clothes and boots, he pulled off a pair of riding gloves and offered a hand to Lhored, who, with Mak and Jode, stood to greet him.

 “Grisham Lekvel,” he said, accepting a firm squeeze on the shoulder from the brez. “And gentlemen: thank you for coming. Mother,” he addressed the kubnath, who remained seated, “sorry I’m late. We were working the stallion up on the other side of Nole’s Butte. I came as soon as Wood let us know you were on the way up the road.”

 “It’s good to see you, Lenn,” Lhored replied. “And it’s good you were able to be here.”

 He gestured as though he was about to introduce me to the young new kubna, obviously Mitchel of Cham Fos’s son, but Lenn interrupted.

 “Lhored,” he said, “let’s get down to business. What the hell happened to my father?”

Meji gasped softly. The other two widows glanced at Lhored expectantly. Jode and Mak looked on, stolid as ever.

 If Lhored was annoyed or otherwise perturbed, he didn’t let it show. “He was murdered,” he said.

 “Yeah, so we’re told. How did that happen? And who did it?”

 “He died on a street in Lek Doe. Apparently the killer was a thief that jumped him.”

 “That doesn’t make any sense. My father would take out anyone who tried to bring him down.”

 “He probably didn’t see the guy come up on him. It was stone dark that night.”

 “Night?”

 “Mm hm. We think it was pretty late. He’d been out on the town. And he was in a lane where all the shops were closed.”

 “Come on, man! What the hell was he doing out in the middle of the night, on some godforsaken back street in Lek Doe where nothing was going on?” Behind him, Bett sent Lhored a narrow-eyed [CAUTIONARY? GIMLET? PIERCING? SHARP???] look and shook her head, almost imperceptibly, no.

 “We don’t know, Lenn. He must have gotten turned around and lost his way.”

 “How the devil could something like that happen? Who was with him?”

 “No one.”

 “No one? What was he doing out there?”

Lhored regarded Lenn while he let this set for a second or two. “He was celebrating, lad. Far as we can tell, he’d just come from a saloon.”

Salon was more like it, I thought. Liana’s place did let the liquor flow, so one could call it a bar. Sort of.

“Celebrating? If he was partying, why wasn’t anybody with him?”

Progress made. Very, very slow progress. This took all afternoon to gag out. At least we’ve got some conflict going on, between the “king” (as it were) and the surly young son of the deceased potentate, heir to his father’s rank.

We haven’t gotten around to the delicate matter of why Mitchel refused to take anyone with him when he went out for a night on the town — he was haunting his favorite houses of ill repute — nor have we explained the potentially explosive matter of why Hapa Cottrite is present: he was sent by the town’s governing councilors as a kind of “gift” to express their regret at the loss of a powerful and dangerous warlord. But at least we have something in glowing little computer characters.

Do plot outlines, scene outlines, or just random notes ever help you to get past a low spot in your writing?

The passage above is draft material for a yet-to-be published sequel. But the story of what happened to Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos appears in the third Fire-Rider volume. Order a print copy here, or download the Kindle version from Amazon.

3 Homeward Bound

Blank book image: Shutterstock, © 2016 Evgeny Atamanenko