The Second Wall

I’ve talked about the first wall I hit since I started this project, and how I got past it. Now I’d like to talk about the second one I hit, and the periodic rearing of its ugly head.

Once again, I’m not talking about writer’s block - the blank page syndrome. That hasn’t happened to me, at least not in the way I envision it, where you sit down and have nothing to write about, nothing to say. I wonder if it’s a cliche in film with little basis in reality. Or maybe it’s a literary fiction thing, where the writer is resisting all structure and plot and waiting for the essence of the universe to flow through him, or something, and it’s not flowing.

What happened to me, this time, is that I got to a point where I had cherry-picked all or most of the sections of the book that I felt like writing, and was now in a position where I had to write pieces that needed to be written, but that I didn’t feel like writing right then. These weren’t necessarily boring parts…ideally all boring parts will be cut anyway, so there’s not much sense in writing them in the first place, really.

These were perfectly good parts, dealing with things important to the characters: relationship building, learning key skills, stepping stone conflict encounters, that kind of stuff. Also, the big showdown climax, which you’d think I’d be eager to get to.

And I am. But just then, I didn’t feel like writing these pieces. I didn’t really know why. Part of it, I think, was that I had spent a lot of time on the parts dealing with one POV character, and now I needed to move to a different POV character who I hadn’t written on for a couple of weeks or more. I can’t explain it further than that, other than to assume it was my own ornery laziness that I had to fight through.

The solution to this was the same as always: keep writing. I chipped away at it bit by bit, and in the process I had some of the shortest writing days that I’d had since early on in the project. It took me almost a week to get through a 2-3 chapter sequence. Now, as I approach the end of the first draft, sometimes it takes days to get through a single chapter.

By this point, though, it seems to be paying off. I’ve got some holes that need to be filled in early chapters, and some continuity smoothing, but other than that, I’m finally to the point where the last remaining parts of the first draft are getting knocked out, and all that will be left is the big showdown climax and the denoument afterward.

Of course, once the first draft is done, that’s when the problems will really start coming.