I don’t often suffer writer’s block. It does happen to me occasionally. Most of the time I don’t consider it to be a real block, though. Rather, what’s usually happened is I’ve written myself to a place where I can’t make the story move any further. This usually happens because I didn’t write something correctly some time before that, and my muse, or my subconscious, or my intuition, or something, just won’t let me go any farther until I fix it. The problem is that I never get any hint as to what the problem is. I have to keep going back over what I’ve written until finally something breaks loose and I see it.
Case in point: currently working on Fire, Salt, and Blood, making revisions to earlier draft material (four years old) to make it cohesive and bring it in line with what the current concept of the story is. I’ve been hung for about two weeks. I had written to a place, and the next night when I came in, I couldn’t pick it up and go. Ditto for each successive night, until tonight. I finally figured out what was keeping the story from moving forward. I moved back up the line about three pages, carved four words out of an existing sentence to start a new sentence, and added twenty-three new words to them to make a new sentence. Then I moved back down to the stuck place, and things started flowing. Five hundred and eighty-seven words later, I called it a night, having completed the revision of a section that I started eighteen days ago.
I don’t mind these things happening….I just wish the muse (or my subconscious, or whatever), would be a little more helpful about pointing out what the problem is. 🙂
Rolling total = 81,847.
D