I did pretty well during NaNo. I won, which means I cranked out fifty thousand words in a month–no small feat. However, I’ve been stuck on the climax for over a week now.
This is bad. You see, I found that the key to beating writer’s block is to go back to where you were last writing smoothly and take the story in a different direction. Writer’s block is no more than your brain trying to tell you the story is going the wrong way. It’s very important that you listen to the creative part of your brain.
The problem is, this is my climax. It’s what I’ve been writing towards the entire book. How can it be wrong?
Well, I’ve introduced two new characters and roped them into the climax. I also pulled another character into the climax. Instead of juggling two characters, I now juggling five. And instead of writing in one point of view, I now have three. my suspicion was that this was the problem. My brain works well linearly, but when I have five different characters numerous plot threads going on, bringing it all together can be difficult for me. I tried to solve the problem by plotting. I couldn’t. Obviously something else was going on.
Yesterday I thought I had an epiphany for taking the climax in a slightly different direction, but when I thought more about it, I realized it didn’t close a particular loop. Today I had another revelation: the reason I’m stuck is because this climax doesn’t close all my loops. It’s the same problem I had when I tried to rewrite the ending for book 1. The end of your book needs to close all the loops you created (unless you plan on resolving some in the following book).
So where do I go from here?
I’m going to go back to chapter 25 and try to close a couple of loops prior to the climax. It will make chapter 27 cleaner and get rid of two of the characters.
Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.
It’s great following an author on their writing journey, to learn the things they struggle with and how they adapt to overcome them.
It’s inspiring to know there is a solution and when needed, to backtrack and make changes rather than hammer your way to try and achieve an outcome that may not work properly.
Thanks for the insights.
Good luck with it!!