November Blaze

LOL, Nancy.  I did get lucky with this one, huh?

SJ, I hope you enjoy the story and good luck with your writing endeavor.  Blaze is really a great line to write for.  It allows lots of variation in story lines and growth opportunities for its writers.  I highly recommend it.

As far as writers block, that is a tough one, made tougher because everyone has their own way of approaching the craft of writing.  It doesn't happen to me much because I tend to take a lot of time planning out the scene in my head before I sit down to write.  My joke is that I'm a fast writer but a slow and agonizing thinker.

For me, I find that I get writers block when I don't have a clear idea what I want to accomplish with the scene.  Sometimes I get it when things aren't feeling right to me.  Today is a good example, because I sat down to write a scene, and though I thought I knew what I wanted to do, nothing I wrote was feeling right.  Slowly but surely, my writing got slower and slower until it crept to a halt and I was staring at the page, scratching my head trying to figure out what was going wrong.

For a while, I tried getting up from the computer and doing something brainless, like cleaning or vacuuming.  Often that jars things into perspective for me.  But in this case, nothing was working (though my house is clean LOL!) and I just had to sit down and start playing with things.  I changed the dialogue, tried one thing, didn't like it, took it out, then tried something different.  It took me several reiterations, moving the characters in one direction then another before I struck the right chord and had that "aha!" moment. 

So like I've heard lots of writers say, the only way to get beyond writer's block is to just put something on the page, then be willing to delete it all and try something different, which is where I think people get tripped up.

When I was first starting out (and still now sometimes) I was SOOO reluctant to delete anything I wrote.  Especially if it took me a long time to write it in the first place, or if there was a particularly good line in there.  Instead of deleting, I used to cut and paste into a "clips" file so it would be there if I wanted it back.  But really, I think the most liberating thing a writer can do for him/herself is to cut what you've written.  Once you can start doing that freely, you'll find the words flow more easily.  Maybe it's because the pressure is now off to make every word right the first time.  When you relax and give yourself license to take out something that doesn't work, you stop worrying so much and start putting things on the page.

Of course, that's just one take and I'm not sure how helpful that is.  I think if you ask 100 writers, you'll get 100 different answers!  But I wish you lots of luck and be sure to keep us all posted on your progress. 

Lori