Distractions are everywhere.
If you’re a writer, you already know this. You’re
reading this blog because you’re distracted right now. I’m grateful that you’re
reading this, but it does illustrate something that every writer faces at one
point or another.
Distraction.
You think to yourself: I won’t be on the Internet for long…I’ll just check my sales dashboard,
and then I’ll get back to work.
So, you check your sales dashboard.
Then, you think to yourself: Well, wasn’t that interesting. I wonder if T. M. Bilderback, or Joe
Konrath, or Hugh Howey, or Courtney Milan, or Passive Voice, or (insert
your favorite blogger here) has a new
entry. I think I’ll go check.
Now you’re checking the blogs of your favorite
authors, and reading the new entries.
Great.
Hmmm…maybe a
quick check of my web page stats…then Facebook for a while…then I need to check
Twitter…and maybe chat a bit on Kboards…
Congratulations. You’ve just blown most of your
morning. Now it’s time for lunch, and you’ve got nothing to show for your
morning.
That’s a distraction problem.
I have it, you have it, and most other writers
have it. They may not be distracted by the things I have listed here – they may
be distracted by completely different things.
The point is, how do you combat distractions?
I know what works for me. If I ever fall into the
well of distraction, I drag myself over to my current manuscript and force
myself to write a sentence, then a paragraph, and, before you know it, I’ve
lost myself in the story that I’m trying to write. My own work has distracted
me away from the distractions!
Another thing that I’d like to discuss is the
thing called writer’s block.
My opinion on writer’s block is this: You’ve
written yourself into a hole, and you can’t think of a good way out of it
without losing a lot of what you write. You really don’t want to sacrifice what
you’ve written, but you can’t think of a good way to continue, either…so, what
do you do?
I have an old friend that has several writing
projects started, but one of his projects in particular is close to his heart,
and he’s desperately trying to finish it. He recently asked me what to do to
get out of what he called “writer’s block”.
My answer was simple, and I’ve shared it many
times before: if you’re stuck, blow something up.
Seriously. Have your heroine get slightly injured
in a sudden car crash while she’s driving home from work. You get to describe
the accident, and you can take several pages to describe her injuries, the
repercussions of those injuries, and whether it really was an accident, or if
someone suddenly decided to kill her. It could cause your hero to finally
declare his love for the heroine. Or she could be targeted for assassination.
Or it could simply be an actual accident. The choices from there mushroom out.
Choose the one you feel most comfortable with, and expand your story.
Another example: Your hero is a lineman for an
electric company. Shoddy maintenance blows a huge generator at the plant, and
electricity is cut off for thousands of people. Now, your hero is outside,
trying to repair damage. Or, he’s inside, helping to repair the generator. Or
he’s trying to help those that were injured when the generator blew.
Last example: You have a character named Joey
Justice, and he has a reputation of accidentally blowing things up.
It happens a lot.
The point is, you’ve caused something to happen to
divert your characters’ lives into another direction. You’ve “blown up” the
status quo, and given yourself something to write about that will hopefully get
your story back under way, and broken your “writer’s block”.
You can let this “explosion” of events be a branch
in the characters’ lives. Your hero, or heroine, are tooling along their life
in one direction, when, suddenly, BAM!
Their lives are thrown into turmoil by happenstance.
Just like real life.
Real life often throws curveballs into our lives
that we don’t see coming. How we deal with those curveballs decidedly send our
lives into a direction that we hadn’t expected.
Your characters can do no less.
That means, stop distracting yourself, get rid of
your writer’s block, and blow something up! It’s the only way to shake things
around a little!
Also, you can…
Keep reading!
T. M. Bilderback (But you can call me Michael)
Visit my website: www.tmbilderback.com
Follow me on Twitter: @mrtmbilderback
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