Worked on Chapter 8 some today. Just the first half anyway. This Chapter is going to take more work than the previous Chapters.
It’s the dialogue and character revelations that need tweaking. A lot of the dialogue is out of order not to mention clunky. I figured out what the problem was: I had a situation where my character who is afraid of clocks was sitting in a car with a dashboard clock. Once I realized that I, of course, fixed it. By fixing it I was able to take a somewhat boring introduction into a funny character moment that revealed more about a new character plus show how the other one operates without her wife to help her.
The weirdest things can jam you up. Sometimes it’s a situation like that where you have a character not addressing something that fundamentally they should address, or sometimes it’s you have the characters in the wrong room.
Writing is half subconscious and half conscious. The trick is learning how to balance the two together. Writers block, for me, is my subconscious telling my conscious that I’ve fucked up somewhere. I know it sounds like some hippy dippy bull but it’s not. When I first started the rough draft of this story I had pounded out four chapters, none of them good, all of them forced. Even my Grand High Benevolent Editor was having second thoughts about this story. Then I realized for reasons I won’t go into here, I had an entire character that was unnecessary.
She was part of the overall plan, so she had to be there. Right? Wrong. She didn’t. It dawned on me during the day when I was at work. I came home and took her out. The dam broke. I overhauled those four chapters and pounded out another one that night. I sent the revised stuff plus the new chapter to the Grand High Benevolent Editor and here we are working on the final draft.
Writers block is your subconscious telling you to get out of your own way. To really look at the decisions you’ve made to get to where you are. You have a scene in this room instead of that room. Why? These characters instead of those characters. Why? You did this instead of that because you’re afraid if you do it something will happen. Why? Writer’s block forces you to ask ‘Why?” If you don’t have an answer, well then, there’s your problem.
Jeremiah
jshermanfiction 