STUCK!

I know, from someone who writes an absolutely insane amount of words a day, how is this possible, right?  (I was just padding my own ego there, forgive me).  But seriously, the truth is that this happens to everyone.  I usually solve it by breaking down the story.  Not the book.  Not the novel.  The core story.

For One More Day, the story is about a girl with cancer who just wants to survive.  In When We Were Kings, it’s about a princess who never wanted to be anything but a wife, and now that choice is gone.  For Challenge Accepted, it’s about a girl who wants to be the first female professional gamer in the PLG.  For BloodLust, it’s about a humanlike woman who wants to no longer be alone.  One simple goal.  One single line that the character follows through all those other twists and turns.

Oddly, reading the above, I realize that I need to write a few more books about men.  I have them, they just aren’t on the schedule, yet.

But, carrying on…. I’m currently stuck simply because I don’t KNOW what I need to know.  That means I’m off to do research.  I can’t even imagine how authors used to write stories in a time before Google.  It’s mind-boggling, to say the least.  They’d probably spend years of their lives in a library, thumbing through countless reference books, then interviewing people who really couldn’t care about this crazy book.  And just imagine if you weren’t a published author?  No one would give you the time of day!

And so, here I am, taking a little break from reading about this and that to ponder the ease of modern writing, all because I got stuck.  Yeah, I’m going to work out this little problem, and my book will probably be better for it – but so will the ones that come after.  I got stuck somewhere in my plot, and spent almost an entire day thinking about how exactly I design a story.  How do I make a journey that will be convincing to the reader?  WHY is it that people enjoy my books?  After mulling it over, trying to figure out why I can’t write the ending of this story, it’s all suddenly clear.

I’m stuck because I was trying to end the wrong story.  I got stuck in my writing because I was trying to force the story instead of tell it.  I got stuck because I stopped thinking about why the reader will care about this person, and started thinking about what I could impart.  That’s not story.  That’s my own ego getting in the way, and all my ego is good for are a few cheesy jokes in my blog.

Lesson learned.  I’m gonna go make sure the next novel is the best one I pur out…. until the next.