Know Where You’re Going

I used to be plagued by writer’s block.

It actually made me scared to take the magazine job, because when I got hired, it was as assistant editor/writer, and I understood much of my primary function would be feature-writing. For someone who was, at the time, stuck on chapter three of her first novel (and who had been stuck there for more than a year), the idea of having to write on demand was daunting.

But I took the job anyway and here’s what I learned: I only have writer’s block if I don’t know what comes next.

Some writers may not like the idea of outlining or planning ahead or having an ending in mind, but for me it’s crucial. So before I start an article, I list the ideas I plan to cover, group them as logically as possible, and sub-list details that support my main points.

I know where I’m going in fiction too — I know what each chapter will cover, what aspects of which characters will come out, and how they need to change to get where they’re going, ultimately.

It may sound like this stifles creativity but it doesn’t, for several reasons. First, it’s very freeing — I can play with sentences and paragraphs indefinitely and I have something to measure them against (my idea of where they need to go and what they need to accomplish), so I have a way to know if they work.

Second, I never need to worry that I’m going to write myself into a hole that I have no workable way out of, nor write something on page 250 that completely changes the themes I’ve been developing on pages 1-249 — it eliminates much re-writing and re-working. I’ve thought my ideas out well enough before I start writing that I know what I want to say. I haven’t yet had the problem of discovering that what my characters’ actions are actually saying isn’t what I intended, because I’ve examined the possible interpretations beforehand. So, because I don’t have to keep worrying about the BIG picture, I can worry about the details — this sentence. That description. This word choice. That small scene. This interchange of dialogue. The things that keep people turning pages.

Third, my characters still surprise me, despite my planning. Stuff I never consciously thought of pops into my head, and because I’ve set my expectations of my story up so thoroughly in my head, what pops up almost always just fits. One of my characters in my first novel is an old crank, and one day it just popped into my head that she’d keep people out of her yard by planting poison ivy on purpose. Well, this created problems with her neighbors, and out of that her history became clear to me, and before I knew it, her role in the bigger structure of the story had been completely accomplished. Why? Because I decided what her role should be and, apparently, turned my subconscious loose on it, and the ideas came thick and fast. Workable ideas — my subconscious knew what I needed because I had a solid plan in place.

Some writers don’t want to know in advance where they’re headed — and if that works for them, great! But I’m not one of them. And if you’re stuck, maybe you, like me, need to stop writing briefly and figure out where you’re trying to go — find out what happens next — and see if that helps.

~ by seriouswriter on June 14, 2007.