I try not to buy into the spooky spirituality some other writers talk about when they talk about the craft of writing. You know the types: the ones who speak about muses, ideas on the wind, and special writing totems on their desks they absolutely cannot write without.
Apart from coffee. I’m pretty sure coffee is required.
What I believe in is creating the right environment and mindset that lowers the barrier between the subconscious and the conscious and lets creativity flow. For me, that means creating my modern-day wizard’s lair filled with odd knick-knacks and framed art ranging from meditative landscapes to surreal visions of fantasy. My bookshelf speaker pumps out groovy tunes behind me, which these days alternates between my Cult and Black Keys stations on Pandora according to my mood. My desk setup has the laptop, two external screens, and the tablet arranged so all my notes, maps, dictionaries, and other references are a glance away from the main screen with the current work in progress. I’ve even put up a magnetic dry-erase board behind me for keeping track of physical notes.
It’s taken a few years to get the space properly set up, but it’s damn nice, if I do say so myself. There’s absolutely no reason for not getting work done, but here’s where the spiritualists might be right. You can sit down and start writing, but there are days where nothing comes out resembling a story.
Characters might talk to each other in very natural ways, but be completely boring, or recite lines from my story notes that come out sounding stilted and out of place. A planned action scene might be breezing along, then suddenly come to a halt when I realize it would have made more sense to sneak past the guards rather than charging with guns blazing.
This month, it’s a moody clone and overthinking AI that’s derailing my action-adventure story. The clone is one step away from dressing in black and joining the Goth scene and the AI’s too busy digging into its fragmented memory files to do much about it.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say the fictional characters in my head are refusing to work, or that my ideas have left me. This month’s struggle is making the moodiness and introspection work with a ticking clock and not make it seem like the next step is contrived. I notice myself fumbling the handoff between the 10,000-foot view I have of the story and the ground-level mechanics of expressing the vision word-by-word. It makes me wish there was some magical muse or lucky tiki that would keep me from getting in my own way.
Have you even been stuck on an idea? What has helped you get un-stuck?
