Blow Something Up

A piece of advice that I’ve given out to other writers?

Simple: when you get stuck, blow something up.

Every author that has tackled something other than a short story has run across the same issue, usually in the middle of the book: things can draaaagggg.

What does an author do when caught in the draaagggy depths? Go back and rewrite the section that drags? Nonsense.

Blow something up.

You don’t have to literally blow something up, as in an explosion…although, those are fun to do. My Justice Security character, Joey Justice, does that with regularity, and always by accident.

No, you can blow something up lots of ways. Have a character suddenly become ill, and rush that character to the hospital. Make it life-threatening, and you can have all sorts of flashbacks and soul-searching by friends and family members.

Put your characters into a car and cause a crash. Was it deliberate? Was it truly an accident? Or was someone trying to stop the characters from discovering the truth about something?

In a romance novel, you can suddenly have someone from a character’s past show up…preferably with leftover feelings that can cause a love triangle.

Blowing something up means introducing something suddenly and without warning. It can get any author…or reader…through the draaagggyyy middle parts of a story by introducing something that helps keep things interesting.

Authors, believe me: if YOU are bored with the middle parts, so are the readers. Your job, as a writer and entertainer, is to keep things interesting, fun, and move the story along.

Wait…what? Entertainer?

T. M., have you lost your mind?

Nope. That’s what every author actually is. An entertainer.

We entertain our audiences. We say we write for ourselves, or for money, or for literary recognition. And those reasons are great.

But, our real purpose is to entertain. We write to entertain our readers.

And if the entertainment becomes draaagggyyy, it is our responsibility to make it entertaining again.

So, blow something up. Help your readers…

Keep reading!

T. M. Bilderback (But you can call me Michael)

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