Writer's Block: Your Muse's Bitchy Frenemy

            Greetings, merry wanderers of the net!

            Let me get this out of the way now: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Joyous Christmahanaquanzica, and other colloquial holiday blessings. I thought about writing a blog about the holidays, but honestly, the topic isn’t terribly important to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays. They’re a great time to reconnect with family and cozy up in the comforting nook of annual tradition, but I was raised agnostic, so Jesus doesn’t have much to do with me, nor do the Maccabees, I don’t have any African American history to celebrate, nor am I pagan. For the record, though, the actual history of what we now know as Christmas is absolutely fascinating…mostly the pre-Christian celebrations. Look into it!

            So I think I’m finally ready to admit this. After many weeks of struggling and denial, I, generally known as Dee…have Writer’s Block.

            In a word, fuuuuck.

            I’m sure all of my invisible/imaginary readers are well aware of this phenomenon. It happens to all writers of any sort, including students writing academic papers. For me, it’s more of a writer’s wall; I’m cruising along running on the excitement of beginning a new project, of characters so complex in my head finally meeting each other and interacting, of exciting stuff building up, and suddenly, BAM! I’m cartoonishly pancaked against a gigantic Berlin Wall of a mental block. And I am currently smooshed against such a wall in my Demetrius and Chloe project.

            My current block doesn’t have to do with the fact that it’s my first attempt at erotica, though that has been very interesting (let’s just say, having sex is a simple, instinctual act, but writing about it is insanely complicated.) My Writer’s Block always manifests itself at the same time for the same reason. I get hit at the point in a novel when all the main characters have been introduced, the main plot has been set in motion and some subplots have been suggested, all of the buildup is over and it’s time to deliver the meat of the plot.

            Eep!

            This seems to be my Achilles Heel, which explains why I’m the Queen of the Unfinished Novel. I am an expert with outlines, character charts, chapter summaries, and novel timelines, so it’s not like I don’t know where I’m going in the novel. Usually I have the whole thing planned out at least halfway through the plot when I start writing. No, I get stuck when I actually have to sit down and pound out the ideas in my head word by word. It’s easy for me to do when it’s a new project and everything’s fresh and exciting, but when I have to get to the meat of the novel, and I have to keep in mind all the twists and turns that lead to the end, the changes in character motivations, etc, it becomes this Herculean task in my mind and I freeze up. That’s usually when another idea (or an old idea I want to revisit) comes along and I snatch it up, leaving my current project to gather dust.

            I don’t want Demetrius and Chloe to suffer that fate. It’s definitely not my best work, by far, but I have a lot of fun writing it, and I think after a few drafts it could be polished into something worth reading. You know, if I could figure out what to call Demetrius’ penis…but that’s an issue I’ve been dealing with since July. Either way, this is a story that I don’t want to abandon like I’ve abandoned my other little lost projects.

            I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, so Writer’s Block isn’t really a new thing to me. I’ve developed a few techniques to help me work through it, though nothing that’ll help me through this except for the old favourite: Sit down, shut up, and write. There is one I’d like to share, though, in case anyone else out there is suffering from this common creative conundrum (hell yes, alliteration!) and are looking for ways to break the Block. I led a workshop on this a while back for Spring Harvest, a workshop series held by Prairie Margins, my campus’s national undergraduate lit mag of which I was fiction editor for a bit. Anyway, I find it immensely helpful, so I share it here!

Lunch with your Character

This is an exercise I heard of once in junior high and I’ve used it ever since. It’s best for character-driven fiction, which is what I tend to write. Let’s say you’re getting to a crucial part in your novel/short story/fanfiction/whatever, and you realize that there’s a character in your story who doesn’t seem very strong or well-developed, or maybe their motivations aren’t apparent to you because you just don’t know them very well yet. Well, flip to a blank page in your notebook and invite them to lunch!

            I’m a big fan of metafiction (good film examples are Stranger than Fiction and Adaptation), and this exercise is definitely a metafiction practice. You yourself are a character, sitting down to have a chat with someone from your project. It sounds weird and awkward, and it totally is. It especially is if you’re a writer who sees characters more as plot devices than actual people. Not that that’s a bad thing, but if you’re a plot-driven writer, this exercise won’t be much help to you.

            The hardest part of this exercise is letting go and just writing, rather than trying to direct the “meeting” into something with a plot arc. Lunch with your Character is for getting to know a character better, and that’s it. It’s so stream-of-consciousness that it’s hard to provide an example. For those of you who have read my meditation post, it’s a lot like The Room meditation…you have to completely release control and just let your mind flow, which is very difficult for most of us to do. Just do your best to visualize your character as a real honest-to-deity person, saying and doing things you can’t predict. It’ll take work, but I promise it’s possible.

I’ve done this exercise so many times over the years. I’ve had a lunch date at a coffee house with a main character before, and that was the most normal conversation I’ve ever had, save that we had to talk about why she might die at the end of the novel. Awkward. Other conversations I’ve had haven’t been so peaceful because, well…I write about a lot of psychos. One of my characters from the only project I ever finished the first draft of, Ambrose, threw me into his office wall. Another from a while back plainly refused to speak to me because they blamed me for being born “malformed” (they were born without anatomical gender. I can’t really blame them…I am the writer, it kind of is my fault…)

I know I’m starting to sound all schizophrenic again. Obviously I have control over what I’m writing, and obviously my characters aren’t real people in my head. But if I don’t do this exercise as if they are real people, then it doesn’t work. You follow?

…Not following? Getting too weird? Thinking I might need a strait jacket?

Okay, let me try it this way. Say you’re rehashing the Little Red Riding Hood story to make her a prostitute and the Wolf a pimp who wants her to be his bottom bitch. Well, you know all about Red from the school of hard knocks, but the Wolf is a little more elusive to you. So you use this exercise to get to know him better. Where are you going to meet him? This makes you think about where the character is most comfortable and most willing to talk. How about the nightclub you mentioned earlier in the novel, Granny’s Place? So you write a story about you, the author, sitting at the bar at Granny’s (which helps you solidify the setting by describing it, btw), and the Big Bad Wolf Pimp comes up to you. This gets you thinking about how Mr. Wolf greets new people. Does he shake hands? Nod? Stare ominously? What would he say to you, his creator? Does he have questions for you? Would he even want to answer your questions?

Sound a little less nuts now? Just go with the flow, always asking yourself WWMCD? What Would My Character Do? And then—the hard part—writing exactly what your character would do, regardless of what it is. It works, I promise! And no harm will come to you because, big shock, this is fiction!

Okay. I’ll cut to an example. I have actually used this exercise with Demetrius, in all his psychotic glory, and yes, it did not end well for me. For one thing, I always set the scene of this exercise in a fictional place affiliated with the project. In this case, I was going to “meet” with Demetrius at the Seng, the underground club at which he DJs. Well I was sitting on my couch, trying to envision what I would wear to a club like the Seng, when I realized that Demetrius is an incredibly, incredibly dominant human being. If he were deliberately meeting someone new, it would be on his terms, not on mine. Unfortunately, this led to Demetrius knocking on my door of my apartment and just barging in. Yeah, it’s meta-metafiction! Try to wrap your brain around that! Why did I write about Demetrius coming into my apartment rather than injecting myself into his world? Well…because that’s what Demetrius does. He snatches people from their homes and drags them into his world. It’s never the other way around. And I realized that the only way to get to know Demetrius better as a character was to play by his rules.

Here’s a little excerpt from my Demetrius meeting to help make my point:

(By the way, in the novel, I use colons instead of quotation marks. When I write first drafts, I frequently have a specific background colour and font I use to get my brain into the mode of that specific project. The font I use for Demetrius and Chloe has shitty quotation marks, so I use colons. I used the same font for this exercise.)

            Danielle took a deep breath and began to fill the blank page on her laptop with random words.  She was nervous. She had to meet with Demetrius in order to continue with her novel.  She procrastinated as long as she could, but it had to be done. It was the absolute last thing she wanted to do, but she had to meet with him. She closed her eyes and mentally braced herself before thinking about what she would wear to the Seng, where she felt it was best to speak with him, or at least observe him.

            Pounding erupted against the door to Danielle’s apartment.  She yelped, her laptop nearly leaping from her thighs.  She threw a startled glance at the corner of her laptop. It was 2:15am, and the snow was heavy outside. No one could possibly be at her door right now. There was no reason for it. The door rang out with a fresh round of heavy thuds. Danielle sat frozen. No voice came from behind the door. If the person on the other side were a police officer, they would have announced that by now.  If it were a friend, her phone would be ringing. She pulled her open button-down pajama top to her chest, hoping the knocking would stop and she could resume her exercise.

            But the person on the other side was determined. Fresh, sharp knocks continued, quicker, more agitated. Danielle set her laptop down on the coffee table and stepped as quietly as she could to the door. Rising on tiptoe in her green slipper boots, she peered into the peephole and unconsciously held her breath.

            The door flew open with a bang so loud that for a second, Danielle thought it was a gunshot. She flew back, her heart sprinting in her ribcage. She could not believe the figure she saw before her.

            :No.: she whispered, :No, no, no...:

            :Oh, yes.: came the low growl from a tall, lithe man. He stepped into the living room and closed the door with his foot, :I heard you wanted to see me.:

So…yep. Demetrius decided that he was going to barge in on the “real world” and drag me into the depths, which is his custom. He did it to Chloe and many, many others, and if I made myself an exception, then I wouldn’t get to know Demetrius in a way that would be relevant to the novel. Keeping that in mind, if I ever met anyone like Demetrius in real life, and he burst through my door at 2am, I would run. So I did. And Demetrius, who is used to people trying to run from him, knew exactly what to do. Here’s another excerpt from a few paragraphs later in the meeting:

Danielle’s hope sank into panic. Without thinking, she burst into a run, dodging Demetrius to the right and bolting for the door.  But Demetrius was far quicker. His hands closed around her shoulders and in an instant she was thrown into his chest. His arm around her waist was an iron vice.

            :Please,: she sputtered, :Please, d-don’t.:

            :Sh, sh, sh.: Demetrius cooed, reaching up and clutching her chin with steel fingers with a grip that ground the inside of her cheeks into her teeth, :Now, now. You wanted to meet me. Get to know me. Here I am.:

            Danielle was too terrified to think about what to say, :I...w-wanted to meet at the club.: the words came out of her mouth, but she did not form them in her mind. Demetrius’ laugh was cold enough to frost the balcony window that seemed so far away now.

            :Ah, well the Seng is so...impersonal.: he hissed, :But your home, yes, your home is lovely, and so private. And this really is a private affair, don’t you think?:

            Demetrius twisted her head until her ear was nearly pressed against his mask. She cried out, but she couldn’t even struggle against his impossible strength.

:Is my voice in your head yet?: he whispered.

Weird and twisted and scary as this was, by being attacked by Demetrius as many characters in the novel have, I learned a lot about him. For one, there is almost no line between violence and intimacy with him, as indicated by how he chose to hold me to keep me from struggling. He kept an arm locked around my waist and he held my face by the chin. These are both places a lover would hold you in a different situation. And as I’ve learned because Drunk Dee is an extreme face-toucher, most people find face touching to be an extremely intimate act for some reason, a gesture normally reserved for a significant other or a parent to a child. So Demetrius blends violence and tender gestures, which is very, very disconcerting. He furthered that feeling by shushing me tenderly like I was a child misbehaving.

            I also learned a lot about the way he talks. Demetrius isn’t a sociopath: a person who is cruel, depersonalizing, but completely sane. No, he isn’t in possession of all his faculties…he’s not all there. The way he talked to me—his habit of repeating words, speaking in fragments, inserting things like yes and oh in the middle of sentences—really indicated that his mind and his mouth run at the same time, which isn’t terribly typical of sane people. Even when we’re “speaking out minds,” we tend to think about what we’re saying and form our thoughts into coherent sentences without a lot of breakage.

            Anyway, from my brief little encounter with Demetrius, I learned a lot about him that I hadn’t really noticed while writing about him in the novel. This exercise may not work for you, but it certainly helps me get through my mental road blocks. For those of you suffering from Writer’s Block, stay strong! The best advice I can give you is this: Force. Yourself. To. Write. Period.  If you have a blank screen in front of you and you’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes, then just fill it with words, like I did at the beginning of the Demetrius exercise. Eventually the story will take shape by the sheer physical act of writing. If you’re always on a computer, on that note, try writing in a notebook for a page or so. That’s always helped me, too. But mostly, you need to glue your ass to your desk chair, your fingers to your keyboard, and write. Handcuff yourself to the desk if you have to. That works like a charm.

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Not that I’ve ever done that.

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Don’t judge me.