I have been ''stuck'' on one section of my novel for more than a month. It wasn't as though I couldn't move. I could move plenty. I could generate new ideas, options and versions I thought might help me get unstuck, but nothing worked. Like a car on ice spinning its wheels, I was unable to move forward, in this case, move forward in the story. Generating new approaches dug ruts that only made it more difficult to get unstuck. Yet, even as I knew I was doing that, I was obsessed. I couldn't stop spinning my wheels.
I analyzed why I was stuck. There was a simple, logical reason. In order to understand it, I'll have to tell you a little bit about my novel: It's the story of a chase. One team of two people, a CIA agent and a Colombian Intelligence officer, is chasing a second team of two people (what I will call our ''hero team'') consisting of a Peace Corps Volunteer, Jake, and Jesus, a revolutionary FARC soldier who is under cover, pretending to be a Colombian businessman. Jake meets Jesus after Jake is wounded in a FARC attack on the bus he's riding on. Team two doesn't know that team one is following them. They don't overtly know, but they sense something is up. The two teams are having lunch one table apart at a restaurant. Team number one has been overhearing everything team number two has been saying.
As our hero team gets up to leave the restaurant, the two agents (team number one) want to identify them yet, at the same time, not let on that they are persons of interest, so team number one dreams up this plan that makes the two teams of two into one team of four, just as a beautiful woman, Lolita, arrives on the scene. Who is Lolita? She's a puta, a prostitute. We haven't seen her since the FARC attack on the bus about 30 pages earlier. Handling the complexity of this scene is the simple, logical reason why I got stuck. I had a scene with five people, seemingly all talking and acting at once, with three of the five people pretending to be something they are not. Actually, it was my insistence on handling this scene gracefully that got me stuck. That is what has kept me hacking away at a solution for more than a month. I have been frustrated at various times, but I never felt I wasn't going to find the solution.
A writer must understand all his characters to the core, but he must not try to control their behavior; he must let their needs play out against their individual strengths and weaknesses and observe very closely what happens. Readers of last month's EWA will recognize a strong tie-in here, a proclivity against controlling one's characters, or even attempting to control them.
Here is what I did in an effort to break the logjam: This was my process. Wear old clothes because it's messy. I came up with lots of different solutions because I don't know which one would be best. My characters took on slightly different attitudes. I wound up with what seemed like a thousand different ways to go. In truth, what I had were a ton of fragments. I printed them all out. I made notes on those pages, putting yes, no, great and horrible next to certain paragraphs, and writing comments as well. Then I sat with the printed section as one would sit with a sick friend. Slowly a solution began to emerge. I took the best approaches. I found the heart of the novel, or what I thought was the heart. Then I started piecing it together. What came out was a tremendously energetic kind of writing. In every sentence something new happened. Each sentence was a paragraph. Each paragraph was a chapter. I don't think I had ever written like that before.
Sounds fresh, new and brilliant, right? Well, after I finished it and marveled at it, I admitted to myself that it was contrived, artificial, self-conscious and pretty bad. Still I didn't lose hope. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. I was determined that the effort was worth the prize, the result. As my teacher Lee Abbott said, We writers do all the work so that our readers may have all the pleasure.
I started cogitating, meditating, etc., on what was bothering me about this scene and why I couldn't get past it. I sat down three days ago and wrote a long letter to myself which I entitled Letter to Self. In the letter, I leveled with myself about a host of story elements that I was feeling uncomfortable about. I had what I call a come-to-Moses meeting with myself. It took me all day to write this letter, and when I finished, I was able to begin to write the scene. It was very simple now because I had taken all the pretense out of the story elements. I recanted a number of decisions I had previously made that now seemed implausible to me. I analyzed why sometimes I was drawn to idiosyncratic or warped characterizations.
It's very important that you understand: In order for a reader to identify with a principal protagonist, he or she must see character traits in the protagonist that he or she can identify with. The more idiosyncratic or warped those characterizations are, the harder it is for readers to relate. Readers who can't relate stop reading.
In writing my Letter to Self, I set a new pattern. I felt a great deal of relief. I had made a number of poor choices. I saw them for what they were, poor choices. In my Letter to Self, I freed myself of those choices and adopted better ones.
Here's what I know today, Thanksgiving Day, 2014: When we are stuck there comes a time when we must stop spinning our wheels. There comes a time when we must sit down, shut up and listen. Listen to ourselves. Dive deep and figure out why nothing's working.
With me, it's usually a deep-seated need to ruin or destroy the project. It sounds self-desctructive, doesn't it? It is. Through self-analysis I detected what I was doing. I made myself stop and accept a number of much better choices. I chose new terms of story that made it far easier for readers to identify with the story, the heroes in the story as well as the other characters.
Actually, these things that changed: They weren't that crucially important to the story. It wasn't as though I had to throw away large chunks of the story; rather, the changes I made were relatively minor; however, they were crucial to me.
And now, when the five characters are all together in the scene, I can handle it with aplomb because I'm not being distracted by these crazy details that I told myself were cool, but really were not cool at all. They only served to make it difficult to keep readers reading.
Now is that not something to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day? I hope you have a happy one.
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