I completed the first draft for The Assassin’s Escape November 1st, and will be taking some time “off” before editing and immersing myself in the second draft.
Other than fortifying my tan (heading out for a bikini wax soon), I will be working on marketing The Assassin’s Cradle, planning The Assassin III (title to be selected… sometime soon, this means war!), and writing more content for Rupert-Fiction.com (be sure to stop by and see the latest). I might get in a bit of reading, might look for some new music, will hike the trails in the hills and swing a racket on the courts around Los Angeles (tennis courts – lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, jurors, and judges need not worry – unless you don’t get the lob over my head).
Writer’s Block is not something I am intimately familiar with. I might have been in school, but those days are long behind me.
Outside of it being a fearful condition that drags on for months and years, there are times when I sit at the page and wonder what to write, where to start, something, anything, nothing.
All I can tell you, is what I do when it happens. I don’t do these in a particular order or time of day. I just do what I’m inspired to do, and failing that, I do something.
Walk. That’s right, I go for a walk, usually for about an hour, sometimes more, much more. And when I walk, I talk, usually out loud. Sometimes I sing. Walking is the best thing for me when I don’t know what to do. When everything is stuck, I just get up off my sexy bum and move my legs, soak up the scenery, get the blood flowing. If I’m out there long enough, whatever was stuck in my brain, holding everything else back, gets unstuck, and if it doesn’t, it gets things moving, and a walk the next day does the trick. For me, walking is meditative.
Write. That’s right, I write. Any blocks I’ve noticed are usually caused by a lack of vision, I can’t see the road ahead, and it can happen on a micro or macro scale. If I don’t know how to handle a particular conversation, which can get tricky if one or more of the participants have entered the conversation with an agenda, I spitball the ideas on my notepad. I write an outline of how I see events unfolding. That works for just about anything: action sequence, training, suspense, thoughts, interactions. Everything has a flow to it, and that flow can be interrupted, it has peaks and valleys, twists and turns, intersections, branches. The options can become daunting, leading to analysis paralysis. Writing it on the page can clear it up. Reading what I’ve written can expose the stupid and the brilliant (and everything in between). Sometimes hearing it out loud galvanizes my thinking. Other times saying it to someone else can clear it up, or they can see what I can’t see, even if they’re too kind to say anything (I watch their face: if they start looking around, I’m not holding their attention; if their brow and nose wrinkle, it stinks; if they look at me like I’ve lost my mind, I probably have; and if they look confused, so is my thinking.).
To date, every time I’ve had an issue, these two techniques have gotten me past a delay.