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What I mean is, maybe you think you know what comes next–but maybe you don’t feel particularly inspired to write it.
Case in point: I’m working on a story called “Cats Inherit the Universe” which I plan to submit to the FM “cat eyes” anthology.
I was going great guns for the first three scenes, but then I sort of lost momentum. Oh, I knew what scene came next, but it seemed to me it was a sort of “placeholder” scene with no real drama to it.
Tonight it dawned on me that I was making things too easy for my MC. The scene needed nmore conflict and tension.
As a bonus, that led to a more logical, satisfying ending.
So, by not forcing myself to keep writing when I was unclear about what came next, I wound up with a much better story.
What I learned this evening: Sometimes these “pauses” in the creative flow are necessary parts of the process.
That is all.
I had a similar problem during NaNoWriMo. I was working with a fairly detailed outline and there was a chapter I considered pretty boring, so boring I wasn’t really crazy to write it. Despite usually writing in order, I was tempted to just skip that chapter and do the next one which I was really looking forward to, but I figured that wasn’t going to help since I’d have to write the chapter anyway and why would I be more motivated later? Chatting with some of my NaNo buddies, we came up with an idea for something that might spice up the chapter a bit, that idea led to a few other ones and finally to some action, a really significant moment for my hero, an opportunity to advance my espionage subplot and a really nice way to build up the conflict with one of the antagonists a bit more. So there. Sometimes if you think a part of the story is boring, it might be – but maybe it has the potential to be much more interesting with some creative ideas.
Lester Dent and Lois McMaster Bujold, among others, are on record as basically saying you should torture your characters to the limit (that’s an oversimplification, but not much of one) if you want to write a compelling story.
Well, in that special case, my MC did get stressed out and even injured, but he was rewarded in a very big way, so it wasn’t even that torturous.
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