When You Get Stuck on a Scene

When I write sometimes I just end up getting stuck. Call it Writer's Block, call it your Muse taking a vacation. Doesn't matter how it's said, it basically means you reached a certain point where you can't write any more. This can bring any story to a grinding halt.

Especially when you try to rekindle your inspiration with Cheezburger.

A personal rule I use is that I give myself three days with no writing. I don't force myself to think about it either and instead hope it comes along more organically. It does, especially when I give my brain the opportunity to go on Standby Mode (which I will discuss in the next post). Sometimes I just rehash in my head what I've already written, other times I think too far ahead, and sometimes I work out exactly what I need.

Other times, however, my brain just flat out refuses to cooperate, and my three days are up. What do I do then?

I write anyway.

Sometimes it's my best writing, sometimes it's not. The times that it's not I plow though anyway because, later on down the road during the editing process, I come up with a much better idea or flesh out the one that's already there.

You can give yourself more or less time, depending on circumstances, but I use three days because if I have less I'm distracted with the deadline of getting back to writing. Longer than three days and it starts getting too far from my mind. You want a golden point between the two.

Brain Standby Mode

No, I don't mean burst suppression brought on by events such as hypothermia, I mean spacing out. I call it Standby Mode because I see the brain as a lot like a computer. With no activity it goes into standby mode waiting for outside input to get it working actively again.

As a kid I used to space out a lot. I could do it at the drop of a hat, in a crowded room, or even in the middle of eating. Although not as often, I still space out today.

Just honk if you're behind me and the light turns green.

This is one reason why all your best ideas come when you are falling asleep, or taking a shower. When falling asleep your mind isn't distracted by the input of the day, and when you're not kept awake with other thoughts ("Should I watch Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore tomorrow? They're both on at the same time and I can't decide, aaaaaargh!") your brain is free to roam. The same goes for taking a shower. If you're like me you shower pretty much every day.

And if you don't shower at all you probably smell like a hobo.

After a bazillion times showering it's pretty much a routine. It's so routine, in fact, that your brain doesn't even have to devote a lot of thinking toward it, giving it a chance to wander. A shower is also a bit of a sensory deprivation chamber, since the sound of the bathroom fan and water make white noise so that you can't hear the outside world, and there's not a whole lot for you to see in the shower either.

Unless you've got, like, a super rockin' bod.

So maybe you fall asleep really fast and your skin chafes from taking five showers a day, how do you manage a Brain Standby Mode?

Force it.

It's both easier and harder than it sounds. I imagine it's a bit like meditation, except instead of letting go and emptying your thoughts to achieve nirvana or the like you're merely providing your brain an opportunity.

Basically, you want to unplug from everything. No Internet, no TV, no phone, no people, not even a book. You want to make your brain go from focusing on the outside to turning toward the inside. You want it give it an unchanging environment so that it doesn't have to use all of its power processing what's going on. It's why so many authors having rooms dedicated to writing (Neil Gaiman's writing gazebo being a personal favorite of mine.)

Granted, sometimes if you find your brain spacing off about the wrong things (the car, the house, the kids, what's for dinner, work, etc etc) you have to give your brain a little nudge in the right direction. Think of the last scene you wrote, or think of a different scene, or a scene in the future. Play with some ideas, your characters, go through some scenes in your head you don't plan to have in your book.

If you need to, open up to the last page of what you've written, but don't actually write. Sometimes I find myself doing that. I don't stress that I'm not actually writing though, because I'm working it through in my head.

If anyone saw me staring glassy-eyed into the computer screen and asked what I was doing, however, I would tell them "Writing" because, in my mind, that's technically what I'm doing.

Yet Another Maximum Ride Book!?

If you've read my blog posts in the past you know about my Love / Hate relationship with the Maximum Ride Series by James Patterson. Well just last Monday I discovered this:

From Barnes and Noble:

THE NINTH AND ULTIMATE MAXIMUM RIDE STORY IS HERE! Legions of Max fans won't be disappointed by this encore episode in the beloved series about the incredible adventures of a teenage girl who can fly. As Maximum Ride boldly navigates a post-apocalyptic world, she and her broken flock are roaming the earth, searching for answers to what happened. All will be revealed in this last spectacular "ride"- a brand-new grand finale featuring all of the nonstop action, twists and turns that readers can rely on in a blockbuster Patterson page turner!


You know what I say to that? Bull. Freaking. Crap.

This book says to me "Remember that really crappy ending in book eight? Haha just kidding here's the real-real ending!" Book eight is literally titled Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure. I bet this is Patterson's (or, what I suspect, one of Patterson's many ghost writers) attempt at "fixing" the mess of the Maximum Ride storyline that was already so messed up even as far back as book three. So stop, just stop already.

Am I going to buy it? Yes, but my heart won't be in it. It died reading book four, and went through agonal heart rhythm during books five through eight. I'm going to read through book nine and watch as they take a bad taxidermy job and try to make it look better using a baseball bat.

What the series looks like, and also my current expression.