Writing Around Writer's Block

These past few months have been tough. I feel like schoolwork has punched me in the gut, tied me up, and rolled me in front of an eighteen-wheeler. Now, back from Christmas break, I have something amazing plunked right in front of me.

"'Free time'? What is this 'free time'?"

That's pretty much how I feel. The last few days, I've barely moved from my computer, which is a shame, because Texas has suddenly gotten a burst of beautifully sunny weather, and I'm missing out.

But I've been writing, which is awesome.

I finally managed to crank out Chapter Twelve in TDS. I've been really frustrated with it lately. I feel almost like it's turned into a series of events, like Alice wandering around in Wonderland. Now she meets the caterpillar. Now she goes to a random tea party and they talk about silly things. I didn't want my story to turn into a predictable romantic comedy via Valentine's Day, and I worried that that's exactly what it was doing.

As a distraction on the side, I'm challenging myself with Lilla & the Tower, which has been enormously fun to write, and very good for me, since I'm a) foraying into the whimsical and the fairy tale with a retelling of Cinderella, and b) not doing a chapter mapout. With Hearthsinger and TDS, I sat down and wrote out exactly what would happen in however many chapters. I do give myself room to move. Chapter Eight in TDS, for example, where Danny brings Erin to help with birthday celebrations, was not in my original draft, but once I started writing it, I definitely felt like there had to more than just 'Erin goes to give Danny his library card, and they wander around and talk'. That, coincidentally, was another very difficult chapter to write. Writing is kind of like gambling. It's lovely, and very rare, that I can sit down and crank out two thousand words in one sitting. More often, I have to write, check my word count, check my chapter map, encourage myself with chocolate, go running, get up to smell the Christmas tree, make a cup of tea, or take a shower. In the case of Chapter Eight, or the last two chapters I've written, Eleven and Twelve, I had to write a draft, print it out, mark it up in red ink, trash most of it, and rewrite.

Anyway. Lilla. With Lilla, I had one of those wonderful moments where I just sat down and started writing the first chapter out by hand because I didn't even make it to a keyboard. I'm having so much fun with it, because unlike any of my other projects, in which a single chapter can take me a couple days to write, each of Lilla's chapters are only about a thousand words. I'm challenging myself not to map chapters out. Stay strong, Savannah!

My chapter mapping usually looks like this:

Six:
Start with some reflections. Erin is thinking as they walk through London. The party: Erin, Jenny, Emily, Roxanne, Allison, Kathryn. It’s apparent that Allison and Roxanne don’t always see eye to eye. Erin gets separated from the others and, frustrated, sits down on a bench, wishing she had a working phone. She starts talking to Danny, and they talk so long that he finally asks, tentatively, if she would like to come have dinner with him. Erin confesses she’s actually lost, and he helps her call home and gives her money for a train. “I haven’t actually got a car. I’ve got a bicycle.”

There are both pros and cons to this. It's something that works very well for me, and helps me construct the pacing, so that I'm not dumping information on readers or rushing through an important section. It also sets some constraints on me that makes it difficult for me to stray from the original outline when need be. So Lilla is an experiment. I felt like, unlike with a really involved storyline like TDS, Lilla would do better if I just felt my way through it. At the end of each chapter, I sit and stare vaguely at my computer screen, and decide what's needed in the next chapter.

I'm guessing this is working well for me with a simpler story with shorter chapters. But we'll see. Either way, I'm having fun.

One pro, though, to doing my chapter progression, is when I'm stuck with writer's block. I've been so annoyed with TDS lately, I feel like everything I write falls flat. I think I was mostly just grumpy. Today, I went back to my chapter progression to write a note for myself, and I got to looking through the chapters coming up in parts two and three. It reminded me how excited I am to write this story, and how much fun it's going to be, and how much I like the characters and the little moments I have in mind and a lot of mushy gushy stuff that only writers understand. (Right?) I'm standing here in front a semester of nothing but college applications and half-days of school, and I have this wild hope that Default Sweater might be finished by the time summer rolls around. We'll see about that.

I should have another chapter posted tonight or tomorrow, and then I've really got to get to unpacking. Really. It's shameful that I've let myself go like this, just to sit at a computer for two days and write about a girl and her sweater. :)