What to do when you hit that creative wall

So every now and again (read frequently and soul crushingly) :) you are going to run into a part in your story that no matter what you do to it you just hate it.  Whether it is how it sounds or how it depicts an event, you just hate it.  Re-writing the section from scratch is the obvious thing that comes to mind, and often this does help.  If it doesn't here are a couple of things I do to try and break down the creative wall.

The first trick I have in my book is to ask myself questions.  Although it seems very corny and a trip back to elementary school I write down the questions and the answers.  Start broad, for example: what am I trying to say?  Why am I telling you this? What is this going to effect?  From there just keep asking specific questions: Why is George so eager to steal the gold now? How is he going to steal it without getting caught? What is he going to do with the gold?  Keep going until you have a full page of useful information.  Once you have read through your own responses a couple of times re-read what you have already read (unless you already deleted it in a rage!), and then beef up what is missing.  In this case lets say that George has to steal the gold now because he is going to get captured and executed in a couple of chapters time.  The first thing I think of is to give George a good send off and probably be a bit more descriptive in his final pages in the the book.  Sometime just writing down that he is going to be killed makes me rethink it.  Maybe he has more of a role to play.  Nine times out of ten I find that this method works for me.

For that horrible tenth time, feel free to move on to a different part of the story.  Although Microsoft Word can make us feel like we have to start at the beginning and just keep writing until we smack the period on "The End." we can actually write it anyway we want.  Have a great idea for the middle of the book grab a blank page or hit Crtl-Enter and just start with a whole new event.  Sometimes it can cause you to have to alter other things in the book to keep the continuity solid, but let's be honest you are going to read this story cover to cover more times than you can count before it is done.  Identifying that a couple of things need to be changed or adjusted later on is not going to be a major problem.  Once this new part is on paper then return to your problematic section and try it again.

Check in on Friday March 7th for my next update.  Hope you are enjoying the insight to my process.

A big cheer for James who makes his debut on my blog :)

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