Questions

You’ve read through what you’ve written—your first few scenes, your first chapter, your completed novel—and you’ve discovered that your words don’t move you. They don’t make you want to keep reading. They don’t make you laugh or cry. If writing is bleeding on the page, well, you might have scratched yourself, but you don’t need a transfusion. And you don’t know what went wrong.

When you started writing, did you know what story you were telling? This is trickier than it sounds. You might have known your characters, you might have known your world, and you might have known your plot…but even with this much planning done, it’s entirely possible that you had not yet located your deep layer, the heart of your story, the engine that drove you to write it in the first place.

Odds are very good you did not know your theme.

Your theme is nothing more and nothing less than the heart of a novel. It is not a grade-school exercise in tedium, that single droning sentence you wrote that told your reader what you were going to tell him. In a novel, your theme is a living, vibrant, critical thing. It is your particular passion in this particular novel summed up in a handful of words. It is what you need to say.

Need. That’s the critical thing in a theme. If you’re writing novels, if you are doing something this complex and challenging, you’re doing it because something in you needs to write. You have something to express, some particular point of view, some set of life experiences, some driven hunger that you must put down on paper. You NEED. And you need to say what you need.

Maybe it is: In spite of having survived heartbreak, I believe in true love. Or: I believe good can triumph over greater evil. Or: If I were King of Everything, this is the way the world would be.

Your plot is the map of your story. Your theme is the map of your soul, and it is where your characters will find their direction, their flaws, their hungers, and their own passions. They only breathe with your breath, and they only bleed with your blood. Your plot may be Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, but your theme—your take on the world based on your life, your own hopes and aspirations, your own beliefs—might be Chubby Bald Guy Deserves the Love of a Wonderful Woman.

You have themes in you. You’ve built them from love and courage, but you’ve built them from anger and fear, too. You live with them every day, when you’re muttering that argument you had with your spouse or colleague, designing better comebacks; when you’re watching the boss cheat someone and you’re getting furious about it; when you’re watching a disaster and telling yourself, Someone could have prevented that; when you’re hearing the latest political garbage and thinking, This is not the way the world should be.

I could do this better. I WOULD do this better.

And so you write.

You have rich, powerful, compelling, passionate themes boiling inside you. You have something worth saying. Now you just need to know how to figure out what it is, and how to get it on the page.

In Part II: How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse, you’ll learn how to identify your themes, and figure out which are worth pursuing.


- Holly Lisle

Every writer at one time or another suffers from writer’s block. It’s that painful inability to get your thoughts down on paper and it comes after all different kinds of writers. Unlike other ailments, writer’s block is not cured by taking two aspirins and going to bed. On the contrary, that approach can often only aggravate the condition, since pressure mounts and panic increases as the task is delayed.

 

Because different writers experience different creative blocks, different treatments are often advisable. But many writers will find the following course of treatment does the trick.

 

1. Figure Out Exactly What You Want to Say

Frequently you can’t get the ideas to come out because you haven’t decided what it is that you want to say in the piece you’re writing. Figuring your real message out as you write may seem efficient, but this approach can actually counterproductive. In the end, your thinking will be muddled and you won’t communicate clearly. Instead of jumping in without a plan, don’t start writing until you come up with a statement of what you hope to produce and how you aim to achieve it.

 

2. Acknowledge that Good Work doesn’t Always Come Easy

Next, recognize that writing anything is hard work. You’re going to struggle to find the right words at times, and the first thoughts that come into your mind won’t always be the best. Although preparation will help, no amount of forethought and planning will eliminate the tedium of putting your thoughts down on the page. Even writers with years of experience sometimes grope for their thoughts like they’re lost in the dark.

 

3. Turn Off Your Inner Critic

Another sure-fire way to slow down your writing pace is to obsess over what you think others will think of you. Again, careful preparation and doing your research will decrease any chance that your writing will fall short of your own and other’s expectations. And others are generally not nearly as critical as you might imagine. Most of the time, people quickly read your writing and give you the benefit of the doubt about what you say and how you say it. 

 

4. Resist the Temptation to Edit as You Write Your Draft

Another way to get bogged down and overwhelmed is editing as you compose. Going back over the same sentence or paragraph time and time again will only help you to lose the train of thought that could result in a great work. All the professionals suggest that you write the first draft all the way through and then go back and make necessary changes. Make sure that you can separate the writing phase from the editing phase of your work. When drafting the message, write the whole thing out in full with no interruptions. The goal at first should be to get your ideas down before they escape.   

 

End Writer’s Block for Good

Writer’s block can happen to any writer. And one major key to beating it is to not let it stop you. Use these tips to manage your creative challenges, and you’ll be able to beat writer’s block every time it strikes.

 


- Melinda Copp