Ways to Break Writer's Revision Block

The first draft is over. Your story is plotted, it's a pile of haphazard execution, and now the real work must begin.

Revision.

Finding the perfect word. Fixing the dialogue. Bringing out the layers of conflict. Highlighting the tension. Driving the story.
And then comes the inevitable exhaustion. When you aren't swept away in the romantic throes of a first draft, it's hard to stay looking at the computer screen and stay inspired.

Here are some ideas for breaking that type of writer's block:

1. Get outside.
2. Go somewhere and people watch.
3. Find a few new movies to watch. (sometimes it's helpful to watch something that has a similar element to your story, or even not. I watched Last of the Mohicans a couple weeks ago and it made me so annoyed, I wrote on fumes alone for a week).
4. Find media with the same "voice". Example: I'm writing from a male perspective. A male, veteran, cop in Baltimore perspective. And yeah, I could just keep asking my husband "what would you say if----" but it's easier to watch an episode of the the Wire and get a feel for it than it is to try and copy someones specific responses. I did this the other day with Coal Miners on Netflix-- it was on accident, my husband was watching it and wanted me to take a break. Coal Miners has got nothing to do with what I'm writing, except it's the same voice as part of my story.
5. Troll You Tube and Pandora. Sometimes the right song can help you find the right tone. Which of course drives word choice, which ultimately drives the conflict (re: story).
6. Read a book you love. Do not read something similar to what you are writing. Do not read something difficult or too easy. Pick a very old favorite, maybe even a children's book, something you can finish quickly that puts your brain back into "reader" mode and out of "revision" mode. You still want your brain to be revising, but you can never let go of being a reader when revising.
7. Troll Pinterest for the board for your book. Don't know what I'm talking about? Read this: Pinterest for Writers. Then check out my board for my WIP, Black Mountain Crank.
8. Doodle.
9. Move your writing location. Sitting in a quiet room in front of your computer screen might be great when you are on a roll (less distractions), but when you are struggling, the pressure can mount. Move to a different location-- coffee shop, library, even in front of the TV (if you can right like that). And vice versa.
10. Find something that triggers how excited you were during your first draft: skip around the story, read it on a mobile device where you can't revise, write a new chapter for fun, without the intention of putting it in the story.

Things Not To Do:

1. Writer websites and forums. Unless you have a specific problem you are trying to figure out, I find this to be really unhelpful for some reason.
2. Read or watch stories close to your own.

Remember: The goal is to decrease the writing pressure, while increasing your excitement with your own story. So find what works for you!

Butt in Chair

I've learned a lot in the last three years of trying to write seriously.

Most of them include the importance of ass in chair (and limited Internet surfing).

I wrestled with content the last two or three weeks thinking that when I finished, it would be like rolling downhill into the next parts.

But no. I ended up taking a true day off because I would open Word and just kind of stare at it and re-read the same sentence fifty times. I thought maybe a day would recharge me, so to speak. But nope. The next day, I opened word and it took three hours to get through a paragraph.
Talk about drudgery.

Now, three years ago, I would have been like hhmm, I guess it's not working for me right now. Let's go watch TV and go running. I'll take a break until I feel like writing again. After all, I'd reason to myself, if I try writing like this it's going to be crap.

But now I know better. Now I know that 90% of getting anything finished is putting the time in the chair, sloughing through. I know that my skill as a writer does not go out the window just because I don't feel like it.

I've learned to treat it like a job. I put in my time, I do my best, and I don't think about it at home.

Source: flickr.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Story-Teller or Writer?

I never realized there was a difference.

But there are writers-- people who are good at crafting a sentence, using the right words, a strong and distinct voice.

And there are storytellers- someone who can communicate a story, no matter how old/tried/true/annoying and make tons of people fall in love with the story, despite the adverbs, passive writing and shitty sentences.

Don't be fooled into thinking you don't need both. Especially those of you who love the idea of being a "literary novelist"

I'm not the best story-teller. I've read a lot, so I have a natural sense for where a story should go, but I struggle to put together a plot.

But I can sometimes write a great sentence!

Sometimes.

I wrote a good sentence about this. I'm proud of it.

I've been tricked!

I'm a write what you know kind of person, and I've been tricked into thinking I know about stuff.

Knowledge is not understanding.

I just finished sludging through a few chapters on which I spent a week (or more) struggling to understand. I knew what it needed, but didn't know how to show/tell that.

After several days, I think I've finally hit on the right action/right words. I'm sure it will be edited some more as I do more read throughs and fine tune it, but the majority is on the right direction, and the writing is clean.

So in celebration, media!  I'm finally moving off the farm and onto New River Gorge... (inwriting)

A Day At The Keyboard



First Cup



Struggling

Visual Thinking

Naptime

By the end of the day

Cleaned up for the night

Ideas come from strange places.

Last night, I couldn't even look at the computer without my eyes crossing and my head going to fuzz. So, I took my clean laundry and emerged from my dungeon to fold.

I'm at this point in my WIP (BMC) where I need to solidify the motivations of my main characters, and I need to show/say it as succinctly as possible. For me, this is a challenge, because I'm pushing deeper into my own psyche than I really care to push. I think I've been lured into writing about things I know, only to discover I have acted without understanding. Now I'm looking back and trying to understand.

So anyways, I couldn't get it quite right and I've been stuck here for days.

I turned on Netflix, picking an old seventies documentary on the Amish to watch while I folded clothes. I'm not writing about Amish, but Pennsylvania Dutch & Anabaptist culture. Close enough, right? I hoped it would jar my memory.

It did, to a certain extent. I can't believe there was a lifetime where I ran barefoot in dresses. Where I had my grandmother braid my hair into a crown of braids. Where I hayed.

But all that didn't help me understand why, for example, I left. And that's what I was looking for-- the understanding of why, at ten or eleven, I wanted to leave and never come back. Why at sixteen, I went away to college and hardly even called my parents. That's what I needed to know for my female MC.

And harder still, was why anyone would find it appealing? That's what I needed to know for my male MC.

Then, my husband woke up to leave for work. And he came out and saw what I was watching, and as he put his holstered gun in his backpack, he said.

I wish we were Amish.

And then I knew.

I remembered where I even got this idea for a story anyways. We were living in Baltimore, and hanging to the edge of a cliff in every aspect of our lives. For the fourth of July, we went to my grandparents cottage in rural Pennsylvania. It was the first time my husband had really seen Mennonite's, Amish and other German Baptist sects. The broad spectrum of Anabaptist culture.
And it was the first time he saw kids in rumspringa.

My childhood.

And here we'd been in Baltimore for the last two years, where everything I saw was the first time, and he already understood it. Now the role's were reversed.

Our kitchen floor in Baltimore-- it was stuffed with used needles, rats/mice, and the middle of the floor was rotted and sagged into the basement. I could jump here and it bounced like a trampoline.

And I thought, what an interesting concept. Two completely different worlds, two completely different people, looking for the same thing in completely different places. And worse, trying to find those things in the middle of a marriage.

I remembered all of this last night.

The reason I wanted to write this story in the first place is because I don't have the words to just tell you the complexity I saw in my own life. A huge, culture, modern disenfranchised coomplexity...a sweeping complexity that harkened back to a complexity in American culture that's been there since fucking Columbus and was now rearing it's head in...of all places, my marriage.

But while I can't tell it, I can show you in a story.

As soon as he left, I ran downstairs and in ten minutes finished what I'd been struggling with for days.

P.S. I've never been Amish, or Mennonite. My family is Pennsylvania Dutch and while growing up, part of the PARBC (Pennsylvania Association of Regular Baptist Churches). Conservative, but not so conservative. So, I'm not writing about my life--- just the conflicts present in it...if that makes sense.

Signs you have the stakes right

While making your morning pot of coffee, you think about the ultimate choice your MC will have to make, and you feel sick to your stomach because you have no idea which one to make her choose.

I mean. I know what she's going to do. (I am the writer after all)

But, please God, never give me that choice.  I think I'd just defect from life.



Disclaimer: I don't actually know that this a sign I have the stakes right, but it sure feels like it.

From Hawks Nest, West Virginia

A Winter's Day

"Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds."
-Anne of Green Gables

Truth

My favorite thing about stories and story-telling is it's ability to communicate truth.

My whole relationship with God is based on a series of stories about who He is. My life is series of stories, strung together with an overall theme. My day is made up of tiny little stories about baby fingernails and spit bubbles and things which I tell my husband late at night.

The story encapsulates all I could ever dream of saying about my life or the nature of God.

But it's a struggle-- to be honest with yourself and the world around you in writing. I know writers think it's easy (and maybe for them it is) but I struggle. Most often, it's because the truth touches on pain. Even in our greatest joys.

The truth is, the birth of my firstborn made me feel as if God remembered me. That is true.

But even truer is that I felt like this, because when I lost my first pregnancy, I felt as if God had turned his back on me.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

- Francis Bacon