Week of 13 March to 19 March
In this third weekly writing update, we’ll be talking a little bit about a technique I (try) to use when I come up against a form of writer’s block, which I call writing into the next scene. The main reason that I experience what could be called writer’s block when I’m writing is that I’ll get to a point where I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and I feel like I can’t write further until I puzzle it out in my head.
Puzzling it out in my head, however, is not always the most effective solution. Instead, I’ve found that the best technique for me to use is to just keep writing. I force myself to make the characters do something, anything, even if it’s just pacing back and forth in the way I feel like I’m doing, until I know what to have them do next. That pause delay may or may not make it into the final version of the story, but I’ve consistently found that it does get me into the next scene.
As you might have guessed, it was a technique I leveraged this week when I felt like my progress on both Noble Child and Verdon’s Tragedy was stalled. In both cases, it worked pretty well. I made three thousand words of progress on Noble Child, putting that at about seventy percent on that story. I’m hoping to finish it next week so that I can start on May’s episode.
I only wrote a few hundred words of Verdon’s Tragedy, but I did get the characters moving again, which is a good thing; I had been allowing myself to be stalled on that story for far too long. Whether or not what they’re currently doing ends up in the final version, at least they’re done sitting around a campfire and debating what they’re going to do next.
That’s about all for this week. I’ll be back again next week with another weekly writing update. In the meantime, you can look forward this week to a post about space debris, and a review for Elder Race.
IGC Publishing 