the thing about mistakes
My observation is that people tend to repeat mistakes. Even recognizing the nature of the error and how it came to be, we jump right back into the same hole, at least some of the time.
Writer's block is usually about trying to force the story in the wrong direction. I have said this countless times in classrooms, and I have said it here. And still I realized today that I have been running in a circle for two weeks with a very difficult scene ... because I'm forcing something. Or trying to.
This scene is about character A getting some key information. I thought this would happen in a scene with character C, and in fact I have been rewriting that scene a dozen different ways. Every time I think, okay, good. That's it. And then the next day I read it and I groan.
And this is a crucial plot point, let me say that.
So today I realized that it wasn't working because character B is not part of this scene, and she's unhappy about that. Unhappy to the point of shutting things down. The question is, why I was trying to keep her out of the scene in the first place. What was going on in my head? It will be a challenge to get A and B through this scene, sure. But how ever difficult it is, it will be easier than the two weeks I just spent trying to make it work with the wrong characters.
If you've ever read Stephen King's The Stand (which is, I've heard somewhere, his most loved and widely read novel), you will remember an early scene where two survivors of a superflu epidemic have to walk out of Manhattan. There is no transportation and so they decide to try the Lincoln Tunnel rather than walking all the way up the island to one of the bridges.
The Lincoln Tunnel isn't much different than any other long bridge that goes under a river. It's fairly narrow, two lanes in each direction. At one point in my life I drove through it every day, twice. I often thought about the fact that the Hudson River was flowing over my head, but not with any kind of panic. My phobias are very different in nature.
But King's characters have to go through a very different version of the Lincoln Tunnel. There's no electricity, so it's dark once you get ten feet in. And it's full of cars, people trying to flee during the epidemic. And the cars are full of dead people. Mostly dead of the flu, but there were accidents and mayhem and basically what you've got is a mile of dark tunnel crammed with cars and corpses, and you've got to climb and crawl your way through it to the other side.
Now, if I had to do this with the Mathematician, I'd be fairly calm. He's been competing in orienteering events for years, he can fix nearly anything, and reason his way out of pretty much every puzzle or problem. I'd follow him into a cars-and-corpses tunnel, no problem. But King's characters aren't so prepared, and the trip through the tunnel is traumatic. To the extreme.
Sometimes when I approach a scene that is potentially difficult, i feel like I'm standing at the mouth of that cars-and-corpses tunnel, and there's no Mathematician -- nobody at all -- for company or companionship. I've got to get through it alone. Dog knows what hazards are waiting for me in there, but I can't just sit here, can I? So I forge ahead. And sometimes I hit a snag. A wreck I can't figure out how to climb over, a pile of bodies I just don't want to deal with. Sometimes i have to take a few steps back in order to find my way forward. And that's what I'm doing now.
How's that for a long, drawn out, and melodramatic take on writer's block?
I'll let you know how it goes.