No Such Thing as Writer's Block

When I was a freshman in college, someone once said that there was no such thing as writer's block. I was so annoyed by his words and the surety with which he spoke that I can clearly remember narrowing my eyes up at him and trying to figure out if he was just attempting to get a rise out of everyone or simply being pretentious. The school I went to was full of people pretending to be much better at their creative craft than they really were, and the writer's group I attended only once was certainly no exception. There was no mirth in his expression, however, no slight upturn to his lips, no hidden amusement in his eyes. He was dead serious. Someone asked him to explain.

“A true writer is never blocked,” he continued, satisfied by the attention he'd drawn. “Perhaps he may be momentarily stunted on a particular piece, but all he has to do is take a step outside, sit down with a cup of coffee outside a cafe, watch people as they pass, and the muses will come. Will they be for the same piece in which he struggles? Not necessarily. But the muses will come, and write he will find he must. He is not blocked, only redirected.”

I may be adding a little eloquence to the words that were spoken that night, but the message is still the same and it's something I've never forgotten. As much as I thought he really was pretentious at the time, he wasn't wrong. I may not have recognized it then but I certainly do now, years later.

People watching has always been something I have loved to do, especially at a public venue or event like the Highland Games, a concert, or waiting to be seated at a restaurant. You see little things that you can employ in character development that makes them more real to the reader: the way someone plays with their nails while trying to make a decision; the stride of someone whose left leg is just a little shorter than the right; the small, secret smile of someone who's just remembered something that instantly makes them happy and then immediately makes them sad for some reason. People are fascinating creatures and they spark all sorts of creative inspiration in all of us artsy-fartsy types. There have been times when I have been deep into more than one project at once and cement blocked on all of them, but I step away to just observe and the proverbial muses swirl around me as I see and hear and smell and experience creativity all around me. And before I know it, another story idea is being born.

It's the little things. Sometimes, it's the unexpected things. Driving down the road and seeing a man raking the leaves, falling to his knees before the pile he's created. Is he weeping? Did he just drop something that he now has to find? Is he having a health crisis? So much possibility that passes by in the space of time it takes to zip through a green light. The sound of a congregation all turning the pages of their Bibles at once can take you out of the sanctuary as it mimics the soft patter of rain falling on a tin roof in the middle of a cold night. Even the hum of silence can stir up the most ominous of feelings within us, painting before our closed eyes scenes of terror that simply must be put into words, or brushed across a canvas, or put to a rhythm for our bodies to follow. We are, as they say, slaves to inspiration. It comes when it will with no thoughts or care as to where we are, who we are with, or how inconvenient it may or may not be.

One of the areas by which I have always been most inspired is music. My favorite type of musicians are the storytellers who happen to be singing their stories rather than telling them in book format. Artists like Carrie Underwood, Sara Bareilles, and Sia who don't just sing love songs but take us through an introduction to a character, a conflict, a climax, and sometimes — but not always — a resolution. Those are my favorite songs. I think that's part of the reason why I always loved Josh Groban as well. Aside from his amazing voice, each of his songs — the ones that were in English so that I actually understood what was being sung — was a story.

In 2006, Josh came out with his third album, Awake, and on it was one of my all time favorite songs of his. It is still one of my top three even twelve years later and has inspired many romantic fantasies and scenes that were never used in various projects. The song is called “So She Dances,” and I am determined to still use the inspiration that song arouses someday, somewhere, because it is so precious to me. From the first time I heard it, I could see the entire moment as clear as day. The faces within the scene always change but my setting never has, and it has never lost its thrill. There are other songs of his that evoke emotion like that within me as well like “Broken Vow” and “Remember When It Rained.” More recently “Happy in My Heartache” is just... I can't explain why that song effects me the way it does. But still, nothing has quite reached the level of “So She Dances.”

There is no such thing as writer's block. Only redirection. It's something I have to tell myself the next time I get frustrated by the lack of forward motion on any given project. Just because I'm stuck in one place doesn't mean I'm stuck everywhere. Maybe I need to be moving forward somewhere else until it's time for me to be moving forward again in the other place. Kind of like life.

I want to apologize for my long hiatus, dear readers. It was unexpected and I'm going to work my hardest to get back into the weekly Wednesday updates. Thank you for your patience and understanding. It's good to be back with you.

So, for those of you creative types out there, what do you do to battle creativity block?

Novel Soup: Writing as a Culinary Art

Written by guest blogger Alex Genetti

I do hope Diana doesn’t mind if I begin by bragging on her a bit. When her first novel, Heritage, came out in 2014, it lit a fire under me. At the time I was pursuing a graduate degree in professional writing, and story ideas were buzzing around my brain. Too long, I realized, had I allowed them to wheel about freely; now it was time to put them to good use. Reading Heritage, I admired that Diana seemed to know from the beginning where her story was headed and how her characters wasted no time in getting there. I admired the color and music and energy that enlivened every page. I don’t know what her real creative process was like. Maybe it was like mine. In any case, a great recklessness seized me. I wanted to follow her example. I resolved to write a novel.

Now, here’s the thing: I like stories for their characters, sometimes, or for their plots, or for their interesting premises or exciting action sequences. But mostly I enjoy them for their atmospheres. When I read a science fiction story, it’s usually not the events of the plot that excite my interest; it’s the bustling streets full of alien creatures, the dusty, red-stained Martian sunsets, the vast impressions of cosmic loneliness. When I watch a hardboiled film noir, it’s the trench coats and rain-slick streets and private-eye monologues that I revel in more than the mystery itself. For me, atmosphere is often the starting point. Everything else – plot, characters, dialogue – is there to give the atmosphere a framework where it can do its magic.

That’s why, when I decided to have a go at penning my own long-form narrative, I considered first what ingredients should go in it. What manner of strange locale did I want to whisk my reader’s imagination off to? What sort of mood, what sort of tone, what sort of ambiance would I convey? What themes and emotional textures were important to me? Well, I reasoned, maybe I should start by telling the kind of story I would like to read. So I let the ideas come of their own accord:

Misty Appalachian forests. Highways littered with abandoned vehicles. A pale, raven-haired woman with a sword. A villain who thinks he’s Nietzsche’s übermensch. Nebulous Christian symbolism. Guilt and fear and faith and hope. Something about fairies. Dismemberments.

These thoughts appeared in starts and stops over several months. At length I pulled a musty, dusty, post-apocalyptic story idea from out of a trunk I kept in the attic of my subconscious – a very lean idea, really, less than a plot, less than the skeleton of a plot – and I tossed it into a big vat in my brain. Then I started tossing the new ingredients in, too. I let it simmer and boil. I started writing down notes and scenes and dialogues. The rising aroma made my mouth water. This story had everything.

But something rather large and obvious was missing – several somethings, in fact. I didn’t have a beginning yet. Or a middle, precisely. I sort of had an ending, though I wasn’t quite sure how I would get there. I was just following my muse: character interactions, fight scenes, mythological symbolism, detailed backstories, pages of philosophical musings about death. I had so much material to work with; surely the minor business of the plot would sort itself out.

So it was that my first attempt at novel-writing fell flat on its face. Even though I had all the ingredients, I had no recipe. Or, put more plainly, I had all the ideas, but no story.

What I ended up with was novel soup: lots of ideas, scenes, objects, events, themes, and characters floating together in a weak broth of atmosphere and mood, sometimes bumping into each other and sometimes drifting off to float around on their own, never really coming together into anything solid, cohesive, or structured. I wasn’t even sure I understood my main character completely. I had ideas, yes. I had pages and pages of notes on her psychology. I wanted to be Dostoevsky and illuminate the complicated, contradictory inner mechanisms of the human soul, but I didn’t have any notion of how I’d accomplish this from sentence to sentence, page to page. I knew her story would deal with lost faith, the challenge of showing compassion in a cosmos that runs on violence, the corrosive influence of secret guilt, and a subconscious longing for an Arcadian otherworld. But how would these themes play out in the plot itself? How would her convictions show in her speech and actions? What choices would she make, and what consequences would follow? Where, in fact, would the story go? To those questions, I had no answers.

Thus, when I really sat down and started writing the blasted thing, I realized quickly that the story wasn’t going anywhere. I had several pages of text describing a forest. I had my main character waking up, going through her odd, post-apocalyptic morning routine, and ruminating about weighty matters. I had a single inciting incident that I had hoped would get the gears of the story turning. Beyond that, nothing. No direction, no substance, no sequence of events that would point toward a conclusion. When I tried to pick up the whole thing and hold it up to the light, it fell apart in my hands: pieces ran away here and there, and nothing held together. It was very discouraging.

I gave up.

Time passed.

More time passed after that, and I realized what had happened.

I had been drunk on my own ideas. The uncanny atmosphere I had wanted to create, the weighty questions I had wanted to wrestle with, the intricate characters whose souls I had wanted to explore – not only had I let them run away with my imagination, I had fallen in love with them all, even the ones that didn’t fit together or make sense. Each idea held me hostage. It was as if I had taken three or four separate jigsaw puzzles, poured out all the pieces into a single pile, and tried to make a picture using every single piece. It was never going to work.

But now I could see more clearly which pieces belonged to which puzzle. It had been a long time since the muse had stopped singing, and in the meantime I had fallen out of love with quite a few details. I still liked my main character, or at least some parts of her psychology. I liked the post-apocalyptic setting, though I knew it needed work. But the bulk of the ideas I’d written down no longer seemed indispensible. That doesn’t mean I disliked them, only that I could finally see I didn’t need them. I was willing to let them go and stick with the simple stuff that I could mold into a real story.

The lesson here is not that you shouldn’t get carried away. By all means, get carried away. Scribble out volumes of worldbuilding notes. Come up with dialogue between characters who probably won’t even appear in the final version. Write a fight scene. Use your passion while it’s still burning. Think long and hard about what your story is going to say and mean and make people feel, and write it all down. Write down every word.

Maybe it will all congeal into something edible. Maybe it will be a disaster. Either way, you have something instead of nothing. New stories and new people and new places that weren’t there before are in the world, even if they’re only in your mind. Then let it rest.

Put some distance between yourself and what you’ve written. Go for a walk. Have a glass of water. Sleep on it for a day or a month or a year or two. Clear your head. Then go back and rediscover the ideas you love.

You’ll find that you need to slim things down, hack through the foliage, locate the best seeds and let them flower to their fullest. The old writer’s adage about “killing your babies” has some truth to it; a lot of the scenes and characters and moments of soaring emotion that you had once loved so dearly just plain won’t fit anymore. But now you’re no longer a slave to them. Passion is perfect for an improvisational jazz trombonist (I should know), but a good composer needs a cool disposition, a patient approach, to write good music. Or, to return to the culinary metaphor, you can’t satisfy every taste in a single dish. I’m no chef, but I know that good cooking calls for restraint, and restraint, more often than not, requires some emotional distance from the stuff you’re working with. You might want to write a story that makes readers weep bitter tears for the harshness of the world one moment and leap out of their chairs to cheer on their hero the next. You might want to write a story that concerns post-partum depression, Slavic folklore, and pirates. You might want, as I did, to write a comprehensive encyclopedia of everything you think is cool or interesting or moving or worth considering. But probably it won’t all hold together. Then it’s best to step back, put some space between you and what you’ve written, let your passion cool, and come back later. You’ll be able to distinguish the good from the bad, the stuff that works from the stuff that won’t. Some ideas will be keepers. Others, inevitably, will go into cold storage.

But, then again, what’s the refrigerator for, in the end? Leftover night is always just around the corner. Maybe soon you’ll root through the cluttered fridge and find an old character or a snippet of dialogue that would fit perfectly in whatever new dish you’re cooking up. The best ideas will always keep calling you back to them, begging to be used.

Patience, whether in cooking, in writing, or in life, continues to be a virtue.

Character Analysis: The Sympathetic Villain

I've decided to do something of a series here on my blog. Well, a couple of different series that will run simultaneously in the coming months, one of them being a brief analysis on different archetypes you can find in books, movies - any good story at all, really. I've had several very sweet people suggest that I start a writing workshop, and while I am deeply flattered by the suggestions, I'm really not that qualified. I'm just a writer who soaks up what I can, when I can, and I try to let it come out in whatever it is that I create. I am more than happy, however, to pass on what I think I know and my own personal views on certain aspects of writing.

Everyone is familiar with the villain of the story. He or she is the one who ruins the day for the heroes, throwing everything possible in the way to prevent that final goal from being reached. They are loathsome, deceitful, crooked, and downright irredeemable. But what about the sympathetic villain? Is it possible to even feel sympathy for a villain? Should we feel anything but hatred for the one standing against the very characters we've been cheering for all along? It all depends on the type of layers you're going for as an author and what you want your readers to walk away feeling at the end of your book.

In the past few months I have been going back through the first book in my own Age of Valor series, not only seeing the difference in my writing style from then to now, but coming into a more acute awareness of the difference between Laidley and Merrik, my two antagonists in Heritage. You know right from the beginning that Merrik is evil by the way he carries himself, the things he says, and the subtle actions he takes that appear to go unnoticed by anyone but the reader. He is out for blood and war, and nothing will stop him. Laidley wants blood and war, too, and he's right there beside Merrik in planning the deaths of hundreds of people. Nations will fall because he so desires it. The difference between them is motivation. Merrik wants death for death's sake. Laidley wants death because he somehow believes it will make the pain of losing his father less and the betrayal of his sister make more sense. Somehow it will make his people love him, when love is all he has desperately wanted since he was a child. Those are things we can understand as human beings. We know what it is like to live with hurt and loss and to act in our rage because of it. Are we not the villain as well in those moments?

A sympathetic villain is motivated, at her very core, by something pure. Usually it is love, or lack there of, and loss. He doesn't start out wanting to be the “bad guy,” but evolves into what he becomes out of perceived necessity. She has this idea that once she reaches her end, when she has her hilltop moment, everything will go back to the way it was and everything will be magically right with the world again. There is a certain level of innocent disillusionment in him, one that could never be present in a true villain.

For example: Hela and Loki. Yes, Hela gave us this sad story about Odin sending her to Hell and all this blabbity blah that was like, “Okay lady, whatever, you're still a wack job who just wants everyone to bend to her will and death to those who do not take a knee before her.” Loki, on the other hand, always felt like he was second best to his brother, found out he was adopted, and always felt like he had something to prove and so he set out to make sure everyone understood he was second best to no one. He, like Laidley, just wanted to be loved. He wanted to prove he had worth. And then in the end...well...love. And loss.

Magneto (Erik Lensherr) is another great example. Here is a man who feels like he is doing right by all mutant-kind, fighting for them, protecting them, and by doing so he is only making mutants more of a target in the eyes of humanity. Long before his story ends, he even ends up making enemies of those he is trying to protect, yet he still clings to his belief that what he is doing is the right thing. In X-Men: Apocalypse we get to see Erik living a normal life with a wife and young daughter, holding down a job. Then, when it's discovered he's a mutant and his daughter is captured in the woods in an effort to get him to surrender because he used his powers to save a co-worker, things go horribly wrong. We see this man who has built this life, content in leaving his mutant life behind, tormented over having to use his powers again and using them to kill, doing it all, once again, for people he loves and ultimately losing them.

The Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera is perhaps one of the most recognizable examples of a sympathetic villain. Driven by loneliness and infatuation, he stops at nothing to lure Christine to his lair where he plans to keep her, only to let her go when she removes his mask and sees his face. He's mortified by his own ugliness, but it's only a momentary stun. He still so longs to be loved that he again pursues her and captures her, only to realize in the end that she could never truly be his, and so, with his heart breaking, he lets her go.

Love and loss. Doing the wrong things for the right reasons, at least in the eyes on those doing them. That is the difference between a real villain and a sympathetic one. There's no, “Screw you, I get what I want!” mentality in an SV. It's more of a silent, “Can't you see my anguish?” scream from deep within that stays behind a facade of ambivalence and devilry.

Not every story has a sympathetic villain, neither does every story have a straight up villain. It is rare – at least as far as I have found – for a story to have both. There's something to be said for the former, in my opinion. It adds a certain amount of humanity to a story. Instead of the hero claiming victory at the end and everyone walking away happy, the SV stays with you, making you wonder if things could have turned out any differently for them. Those are the ones that stick in your thoughts long after the last page has been turned.

What is your take on the villain versus the sympathetic villain? Do you prefer one over the other? Know of any good female SVs? I had a super hard time thinking of any, and I'd love to read up on some or even watch a good movie featuring a few. Share your thoughts!