Here is the scenario. You’re coasting along in your writing world. Your characters are gelling–more than gelling, even. They’re interacting, volleying the scenes back and forth with you, going places you didn’t think they would. The setting is developing. There are trees, basketball courts, evil principals’ offices, maybe the kitchen table takes on symbolic meaning. And the plot! Well, it’s perfection. Not only is the story progressing, but it’s doing so continuously, excitingly. There’s no lack of pacing at all. You’re super proud of yourself and pat yourself on the back or get that pudding pop break you’ve been craving. Then you’re back, ready to move forward from where you left off. Of course, that’s when it happens. You hit a wall.
In cartoons this is very cute, and the character always bounces off the wall and then keeps on running. In my world, it’s not cute. I stare at the screen, minimize it, maximize it, look at it from another angle. But that doesn’t work. Then, I minimize the screen again and play Bejeweled Blitz or Scrabble on Facebook. Surprisingly, that doesn’t help either. Through all this, I wonder what happened. Where did I go wrong? When the wall smacked me in the face in the past, I thought my story was flawed. Maybe there were holes. There always are in the first draft. But that itself wasn’t enough. And just because there were holes, was no reason to scrap the idea (which is where my brain often went–into a sprial like on those water slides, thinking that there was nowhere to go now but down, into a centimeter of water. Ouch!). I’ve grown as a writer enough to know that the story does have promise but I will have to dig to find out what happened. And, most important, not give up on it–which would be the easy way out.
Part of the problem may be that I detest outlines. But, when the wall rushes at me, that’s what I always end up doing: stop the staring contest with the screen and make a mini outline. What happened so far, where do I see it going, what’s stumping me? It’s not a huge, three page outline, just a few paragraphs, and sometimes this helps. With my current WIP, it did not. This story is totally plotted. I know the characters. I know what has to happen to create the climax and add suspense. My issue with the WIP is that I don’t know how to move the story quickly enough to get it to the climax. So I have a different solution. My next plan is to just write random scenes I know–the big climax scene, the 3 scenes before that that set everything in motion, the ending. I don’t normally work like this, but it’s better than the alternative and at least I’ll be working on scenes that interest me.
What do you do when the wall emerges from the curtain and pops you in the kisser? How do you bounce back?
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