Category: Writing

When writers get stuck

Someone on Twitter said she was stuck on her current project and asked for suggestions for getting unstuck. I started to reply, then realized it would turn into a huge thread.  So, here I am.  Note: as I understand it, stuck on current project is not the same phenomenon as “writer’s block.”   The former is, “I don’t know what the next sentence is,” the latter is, “I can’t write and I don’t know why.” So far, I’ve never had writer’s block, so I cannot pretend to give advice on how to deal with it.

There are many tricks for getting the next sentence on the page.  None of them work for everyone, and none of them work all the time for anyone.  The most I can say is that if you collect enough of them, there is a good chance one of them will help in any given situation.

Here are some of the methods that have worked for me:

1. Write a long, tedious passage about your protagonist not knowing what to do, at the end of which he or she might figure it out, at which point you delete the long, tedious passage.

2. Fallback scenes.  Raymond Chandler famously said that if he didn’t know what would happen next, he had someone come through the door with a gun. In my case, when in doubt, have a meal. In any case, this scene, also, can be deleted once it gets you unstuck.

3. Look for tropes or motifs in the earlier chapters. You very likely have them even if you aren’t aware of it.  For example, suppose in chapter 1 someone is looking through a window, and then in chapter 3 someone else is looking through a window.  Now that you’re aware of it, you can play with it, and, have someone look through a window, tell us what’s there, and possibly generate something interesting.  Another thing about this method is that some critic might notice it and decide it’s Art.  I once did that with a series of puns based on lines from Hamlet; when I didn’t know what would happen, I’d pick another pun and write toward it, and by the time I’d get there I had a good feel for where to go afterwards.  In that case, no one thought it was art.

4. Switch points of view.  Write a scene from your antagonist’s point of view, or that of a side character; what are those people up to right now?  And (as always) if it works to get you unstuck, feel free to delete it.

5. Consider your structure.  This is similar to 3, but instead of motifs, see if you have a pattern in the types of scenes you’ve been writing.  For example, conversation followed by a fight followed by a chase.  If you see a pattern like that, you can continue it, or consciously break it; either might help get the words moving again.

6. Reread what you have so far while asking yourself, “What does the reader think is going on?” and then figure out a way to mess with the reader’s head. Messing with the reader’s head is always a good thing. It causes them pain and they will thank you for it.

I might expand this as I think of other methods I’ve used.  Meanwhile, writers: What are some of your methods?

Convention Programming

In the most general terms, my approach to writing is to write the book I want to read, and hope other people want to read it too.

I take the same approach when I’m in charge of programming at a convention—that is, I try to put together panels built around writing topics that I’m struggling with and that I want to hear a lot of smart people talk about.  That is, for the most part.  For five years I had the honor and pleasure of teaching at a week-long writing workshop called Viable Paradise (recommended, by the way), and so based on that experience, I also like to throw in some of the more common problems I saw coming up among students.

I am, just now, about to start putting together the schedule for Narrativity, to be held (absent a new COVID upsurge) over Labor Day Weekend.  Looking through the proposed list of panels—the ones I came up with, and the ones suggested by others—it’s kind of a drag we’re not going to be able to do them all.  As a rule, we pick which ones make the cut by how many people are eager to be on them, although I reserve the right to say, “No, we’re doing that one cuz I wanna.”

Narrativity is small, with single-track programming that includes breaks for lunch and supper, so the idea is that most people will be at every panel, which leads to what is, for me, the fun part: trying to figure out the flow, that is, how each panel feeds into the next one, as well as which ones are likely to generate the best discussion over the supper break or between days.

Anyway, consider the post an advertisement for the convention, if you’d like, although mostly I’m just procrastinating before diving into the brutal chore of figuring out how many panels we aren’t going to have time for.

The Critic and the Writer

A chance comment suddenly helped crystalize my thoughts on something I’ve been looking for a way to talk about for at least thirty years. It has to do with the way a book is analyzed after the fact, versus how it is constructed.

The comment was on my novel, Dzur, and it discussed how the food described at the beginning of each chapter commented on and interacted with the events in that chapter.  And, yeah, I did that.

After the fact, from the point of view of the critic or the reader, that was a complex bit of layering, where the reader is invited to  consider additional depths of the work.  Sounds pretty nifty, right? Also, probably, pretentious and maybe affected.

But from my perspective, as I was writing it, it was utterly prosaic and practical. Those “additional depths” were hooks to help me figure out what happened next. That’s it. I’d start with the description of the food, then, if I got stuck trying to decide what happened in that chapter, I’d read that description to see if it gave me any ideas.  And, as I was describing the action, I might go back and tweak the description of the food a little, because by then it had become a game I was playing with myself.

I was well aware that this would have the result of a work that had more depth, more texture, more of what Emma Bull has called the “chewy bits.” And that’s great.  But at the end of the day, to me, it was a bit of business I was using to help me figure out what happened in the story.

The analysis by the critic is every bit as valid as the remembered experience of the writer.  I love a good critic for the insights into a work he or she can give me. But the analysis by the critic has little in common with the experience of creation.

Origin Stories

I just got a very nice compliment on Twitter for my origin stories. Compliments are nice, of course. To semi-quote Twain, we do like compliments. All of us do. Novelists, burglars, congressmen, all of us in the trade. But it also got me thinking about why most origin stories are so terrible, and what to do about it.

To put it in the simplest terms, if it’s an origin story, we know what happens. That takes a lot of the fun out of it.  But here’s the thing: this is a perfect case for the 3B rule*: Point of view solves everything. We know what happens from certain points of view; but how does it look from the angle of someone we’ve never considered?

Another consideration (closely related to the above) is turning the predictability from a disadvantage to an advantage, which you do with a sort of literary Judo–using the reader’s knowledge against him.  “You think you know what happened, but what if everyone’s motivation was different from what you think?”  Treat it like secret history–keeping the known “facts” just means you get to play with everything else.

Anyway, not sure if there’s enough meat here for a blog post, but I haven’t touched this thing in a while (it’s not really working yet; I can’t comment on my own posts without jumping through hoops). So, anyway, those were some thoughts on origin stories, and maybe they’ll trigger some conversation.

*If you want to know why I call it the 3B rule, you can ask me. Or Emma Bull. Or Elizabeth Bear.

Harmonics and Correspondence

Some time ago I distilled some of what I’ve figured out about writing into the phrase, “The art of writing reduces itself to the craft of manipulating correspondence; the craft of writing reduces itself to the art of finding the right word.” I’ve been letting that float around in my head for a while now, to see if I could explain it in terms that might be useful to someone. The tricky part is that word, “correspondence,” and what it means and how I’m using it about writing.

I’ve just been re-watching “Doctor Strange,” and going to school with the script. I was noticing some bits with Wong: having a single name (“like Adele….or Aristotle,”) and whether he ever laughs, and how the writer (C. Robert Cargill)  used that, returned to it—the exact moments in the film when those came up again, the release of tension, the sense of a callback, the completion of something we weren’t aware needed completing. That last is a lovely thing to pull off. Season 6 of Game of Thrones did a lot of it: paying off things we didn’t even expect to pay off (“Hodor!”).

When I talk about correspondence in writing, that’s the sort of thing I mean. Cargill uses it, as I said, to relieve some tension, to control the pacing, to amuse us, and simultaneously add a bit of depth to a character. But look at the setup for it: we’re at the point where our protagonist is trying to come to terms with his new environment, and the interaction with Wong tells us a great deal both about Strange and about that environment and how far he is from anything familiar. That is all it needed to do. That it then turns around and unexpectedly pays off is a special kind of elegance.

But here’s the thing: that technique can work with amusing bits, and with powerful thematic statements; with word play, and with subtext; with trivialities, and with profundities.  In all cases, it is establishing a correspondence between disparate elements or moments.  It is how symbols—images in which extra meaning is concentrated—can tell their own story simultaneously with the one being told “on top” if you will.  Done badly, it is why that symbolic story gets in the way and makes us feel we’re at a lecture rather than reading a story; done well, the symbolic story reinforces, comments on, corresponds with, the incidents.

Now set all of that aside for a moment, because I want to talk about music.

On the guitar, there are things called “voicings” that are important to better musicians than I am. That is, there are numerous ways to play the same chord, all of which will work with the melody, but each of which is different. For me, if I can find a way to play a chord that’s good enough to not sound horrible, I’m satisfied; but a good guitarist will be aware of the different overtones and harmonics* that each chord formation will have, and will use different voicings to add to the overall effect of the song. The unsophisticated listener (like me) will often be unaware of those choices, but it will nevertheless affect us; if done right, the music will be more fulfilling, more elegant, more lasting.

So now we get to the part of this that I’m struggling to express, because it is simultaneously the most abstract part, and the most practical. Let’s try it this way: Every scene is a chord, every sentence is a string. The string has a note that contributes to the chord, but it also has harmonics.  These harmonics might be the exact metaphor used to express a thought, or the rhythm of the sentence, or the generation of a symbol by infusing an image with extra meaning, or the sound of the words, or a bit of semi-accidental worldbuilding, or a sensory detail, or an extra hint of characterization, or any number of other things.

When you’re aware of those harmonics, you can use them, so even as the melody resolves, you return to the harmonic, you can find correspondences and resonances that deepen the melody, provide a counterpoint to it, or suggest other melodies that are implied but never played.  What I’m saying is that these harmonics are already in the sentence you’ve written.  You just have to look for them.

Maybe this is something you look for in your second draft, maybe for you, you can find it as you’re creating, but it comes down to this: that sentence you’ve written that contributes to the scene, that in turn serves the story: look at it again, and see if maybe there are some harmonics there you can come back to.

* For you mathematicians,  a harmonic is a sound wave that has a frequency that is an integer multiple of a fundamental tone. For the rest of us, a harmonic is a secondary tone generated by the vibration of a string that harmonizes with the dominant note.