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This week: Brick Walls Edited by: Fyn-elf  
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The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.~~Randy Pausch
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.~~David Suzuki
You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls
that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don't have that kind of feeling for what it is you're doing, you'll stop at the first giant hurdle.~~George Lucas
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky.~~Tony Hoagland
When you feel that you are at the end of your path and there is a ten foot high brick wall right there in front of you, and you have nowhere to go but backwards, break down that wall and move forward. There are great and wonderful things on the other side of that wall... and, they have always been there. Let nothing divide you from what you need to do in life, and see the solutions that are right in front of you. The key is, you must break down what separates you from them and choose to find them.~~Rich Barnes
If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.
Jodi Picoult
"What sometimes happens is that you get stuck, and it’s really not what you’re about to do that’s stumping you, it’s something you’ve already done that isn’t right. You have to go back and fix that.``~~Martin Amis
“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.”~~Orson Scott Card |
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At the moment, there is a huge brick wall at my friend's house. In her den, actually. It encompasses an entire wall near her desk, and it has numerous 'head-sized' dings in it from her running herself into it at full speed.. She has a hard head and it is leaving lots of dents in the wall. And her head, well, actually, her psyche. She is frustrated. Extremely. She's stuck. She isn't sure of the dreaded "what comes next?" This author, quite near the end of her novel, has a slew of choice her characters could make, but they aren't talking. They are slathering about in a writer's quicksand, caught at that point where they are half sunk in the morass and can't quite reach the branch to drag themselves out and scared to death they will sink further. She hasn't written in almost three months and each day that goes by adds to the catatonic state of her writing. She wants to be writing as she is never happier than when she is, but nothing is happening and she doesn't know why.
She loves the characters. They are fun, human, goofy and, above all else, both real and relatable. The characters are just fine; she isn't. She is an excellent writer. She makes me so jealous! For a while, she had a ton of real-life stuff going on and, quite literally, had no time to write. Now she does and just stares at the computer screen or, lately, doesn't even want to turn her laptop on. She's reached critical mass.
It isn't that she doesn't 'know' what happens next. She has numerous things that 'could' happen. She has the ideas to catapult it towards the ending and lay the ground work for the next book in the series. So what is the issue? Why this mammoth case of the dreaded 'writer's block' and what can she do about it?
There are the old standbys. Take a walk, work on something else, go make some hot chocolate. There are the desperation cures: do laundry, dust, clean out the closets, organize the basement. Nothing is working. She's going totally batzoid crazy, starting to doubt herself and is not a happy camper. And, let's face it: cleaning house as an excuse not to write is pretty darned scarey!
Perhaps she needs to go back and read the book beginning to end. Maybe that could give her a clue as to where she got off track. Maybe she will find that she really doesn't like a part of it or thinks that something else should be happening. Maybe things were going to easy or, conversely, too hard. Maybe she will decide she needs to throw something catastrophic in there ... to jumpstart people into action. Maybe the main male character needs to have an issue at work -- he's a cop so maybe he could have some sort of criminal go crazy and he gets hurt which could get the main female character out of her own head and thinking primarily of him. Maybe one of the other characters in this ensomble could have something happen. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But just maybe in the going back and rereading what she's written will give her a clue.
Perhaps working on one of her other projects for a while or on something totally new would help. Perhaps starting the next book in her series would jumpstart the ending of this one? One thing I have learned is that writing SOMETHING is better than writing nothing! Even if you can't 'use' what you write, somethimes it inadvertently gives you the clue that you need, that bit of inspiration that makes the lightbulb come on and then it is off to the races.
Pushing through that brickwaall is what is important. Not letting it intimidate you into staring at the screen and getting nothing accomplished. Sometimes you just need to psych yourself into setting off some linguistic dynamite and blowing that wall to smithereens!!! In the meantime, one does need to realize that everyone, at some point or another, does come to a screeching halt as they ponder 'what comes next?' and has to play around with various solutions to that question. Just because the first ten ideas don't/won't/can't work, doesn't mean that idea thirteen will also be a dead end. One needs to remember that one of the best parts of writing is not when it all just flows; it is when you play with scenarios, when you play with your characters, when you give them their heads and let them run rampent. Writing is more than simply getting 'x' number of words on the page --it is letting/creating/ giving birth to those ideas that make your characters soar into their destinies.
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For Authors: March 07, 2018 Issue [#8793]
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