The Cure for What Ailes Ya

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

13. Overcoming writer’s block

Truly one of the most frustrating parts of writing. Sometimes, no matter what you do, it’s like your brain just turns off and nothing will come out. Or what does come out is complete, unadulterated crap. Either way, it can leave you feeling pretty useless.

My personal cure for writer’s block sounds a little dumb, but I swear it works…write fan fiction. No really! Fan fiction is great for writer’s block because the world, the characters, and all the important information is already created for you. All that’s left is to make something happen with all that information. Even better, take something that exists as other-than-written media (like tv shows, video games, etc) and write it out in novel form. It can be very interesting to use your imagination to flesh out visual media by writing it out in novel form, and it really gets the creative juices flowing. Writing a page or two of my Final Fantasy fan fiction (which is just a novelized telling of Final Fantasy III/VI) always gets me ready and able to move back to something original. 🙂

It’s fun…what other reason do you need?

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

4. How you knew you wanted to become a writer

When I was young I knew I wanted to be a writer at some point in my life because, to be super-blunt about it, it was tons of fun. I started writing (other than for school) sometime around the 3rd grade, and I loved making up crazy stories, particularly ones starring my friends and I as the characters. Sometime near the end of grade school I wrote this series of stories starring myself and my friends (and a few people who I wished were my friends…how sad is that?). The stories were based around the idea that this group of friends could enter video games and experience the game like a real-life adventure. As the series went on there were also real-life monsters that came to destroy us, and I believe at some point there was a convoluted past-life plot line that got really silly and smacked of wish fulfillment (but hey, gimmi a break, I was, like…11). I would be beyond embarrassed for anyone to read those stories now, but at the time they were the best thing in the world, they were a blast to write, and they cemented my desire to write professionally some day.

Strike one entry off the bucket list

Today is a very special day for me. June 7th, 2012, approximately 1:00 pm. Mark that date and time down.

What’s so special about this date? It’s not a holiday, nor is it someone’s birthday, or a special occasion like an anniversary. In fact, it’s a pretty normal, even boring day. I’m sitting on the loveseat in my living room, my husband is on his computer up in the bedroom, and the baby is out cold on her pile of pillows on the living room floor. When we three got up this morning we had breakfast (grapes and a granola bar for the baby, coffee for the parents), and we went to playgroup for a couple of hours. It’s windy and chilly outside and looks like it can’t decide whether or not it wants to rain.

So again, what is so special about this date?

I mentioned before, more than once I believe, that I’d never finished any story I ever set out to write, with the exception of one short fanfiction. Today, as of approximately 1 o’clock this afternoon, I can no longer make that claim. Today, I wrote the final words, an epilogue, to my zombie novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Don’t get me wrong…the manuscript is not complete. There is editing to be done, some discontinuities that need to be addressed, some scenes may be omitted completely, and new ones could very well be added. But for all intents and purposes, I have a finished novel. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has lots of (I hope) interesting characters, and plenty of conflict, suspense, and emotion. It may have some errors and some scenes that don’t stand up to critique, but it is a complete story that, if read, will make sense. It concludes.

I cannot express the level of excitement this fills me with. Let me repeat this point once more: this is the first fully original story I have ever written, beginning to end. How freakin’ awesome is that? I know for a lot of people editing is the worst part of writing, but right now it seems like a happy daydream because I have a completed story to edit!

Look out, world! This novel is one major step closer to being published, and this writer is one immense step closer to earning the title of ‘author’.

What does this say about me?

When writing, there is an inherent need to torment your characters in one way or another. Even in children’s books there has to be some kind of conflict, something that makes the character upset or uncomfortable. Otherwise you don’t really have a story…you’re just writing about someone with a perfectly normal and happy life. And sorry, that’s just boring. Whether it’s in books, movies, video games, or other forms of media, people want conflict because that’s what makes it interesting, and when dealing with conflict, what you’re really doing is tormenting your character.

Just think about Harry Potter. How interesting would Harry’s character have been if he had been raised by a kind and loving aunt and uncle who gave him everything he ever wanted, rather than the cruel and unusual Dursleys who made him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs? Would you have been able to root for him as thoroughly if he’d been a natural talent, learning every spell right away and becoming a master wizard with no effort at all, rather than being the kind of student you can relate to…one who struggles through some classes and is constantly dealing with piles of homework he has no time to finish? Would the books have been as enjoyable if Harry had been able to defeat Voldemort thoroughly and with little effort, constantly saving everyone, rather than having to struggle to survive and regularly deal with death all around him?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you are ridiculously easy to please and I’m not sure I’d want to read a book written by you.

So we’ve established that there needs to be conflict, and that the usual way to create conflict is to torment your characters. Here’s the thing though…I believe that the level of torment you inflict on your characters says something about you. What it says, I’m not entirely sure. All I know for sure is that I torture the ever-living hell out of my characters. A zombie story is obviously going to obtain all manner of horror, but the characters in my other stories deal with some pretty awful stuff as well. In the fantasy I’ve had on hold for a while now my main character starts the story downtrodden and depressed. She then goes on to get kidnapped, stabbed, tortured, emotionally beaten up on multiple occasions, psychologically tortured, and even more. I put this poor girl through the ringer and back again a dozen times, throwing more and more at her to the point where any real person in real life would have simply gone insane.

What the hell does that say about me? 😛