The Ten Percent Predicament

I was going to call this chapter ‘Writer’s Block’ or ‘Author’s Arrest’ (no, not that kind of arrest) or ‘Novelist’s Snag’ but that doesn’t accurately describe my problem.  Then I considered ‘The Seven-Percent Solution’ but the math didn’t work (big surprise) and Nicholas Meyer did a better job than I ever will.  My problem would be better illustrated as ‘Hopping Hack’.

            I get one of those inspired inspirations and start out all gangbusters (wonder what that phrase really means?) on a book.  Dialogues, plots, scenes and plot twists all pour off my fingers onto the keyboard to be projected on the computer screen.  But eventually, the high fades and my fingers start to hesitate and my brain slows down (or someone interrupts me).

            There comes a point in capturing the essence of a new project where you just can’t say ‘female lead’, ‘male lead’ and ‘humorous sidekick’ anymore.  You have to stop and figure out what these peoples’ names and back stories are.  Once you have that, you have to give them a place to do whatever it is they’re doing in and then you have to decide if it’s going to be a fictional place or a real place.  If it’s a real place, then you have to stop and do research on wherever you placed them.  If it’s a fictional place, you have to stop and make it up in your head and on paper (well, screen).  And what do they look like?  What age group?  (As I get older, I find it harder to write younger but that means pretty soon all my characters will be in wheelchairs (oh wait, some are) … all my characters will be old and fat and gray just like me.)  What do they do for a living?  I have to figure out all the assorted things that make up a human being for each person.

            Meanwhile, the characters are sitting around twiddling their thumbs (or each others) or they wander off, get into trouble and show up in other stories.  And I’m bogged down in a mire of baby name books and Internet research until … ah ha … the light goes off again as I read a story about a guy who found undeveloped film from 1960’s in his attic left by some previous owner and he took it to the photo shop to see if they could do anything with it and they found pictures of … oh wow, that would make a really great story so I open a new file and start again.

            That’s where the ten percent comes in.  I have folders inside of folders that have the first thirty to fifty pages (I’m on a roll here and am not stopping to do the math) of really great stories in them.  It’s not that the fire goes out; it’s that the fire jumps the river of my thought stream and rekindles somewhere else.  So I end up hopping back and forth between ideas and hacking down the brush with a machete so I don’t end up with a forest fire and burn out before my time.

            I know I have to stop, dig a trench and work on just one project at a time until I finish it or I’m never going to finish anything ever again.  My career will die.  I will die and they’ll find my body buried in an avalanche of paper but finishing a project seems like an overwhelming amount of words (80,000) to find.  And trust me, I know from experience there are long stretches of oh-my-god-this-is-really-boring-writing and why-why-did-I-ever-want-to-be-a-writer out there waiting on me. 

I think I’ll try capturing all the exciting scenes and sex scenes and action scenes first, thinking I’ll go back and fill in the boring stuff later and the more fun stuff I write the less fill in there will be.  But this method produces time warps that tangle and weave, vortexes that let other things enter the story and some really great chapters that fit absolutely nowhere in any book (unless I start a whole new book around them).  I print and cut and paste and edit and sort until the original germ of the idea has died along with my inspiration and energy.  I give up and go play computer games until suddenly my brain sparks and I can see how it all goes together (even the boring stuff) and I race to get it all down before the fire dies.

Looking back on this chapter, I’ve discovered the ten percent is the time I spend writing, the eighty percent is the time I spend worrying about or planning to write (I left ten percent free for non-important stuff like job, kids, chores).  If I could switch the writing percentage with the worrying and planning time, I could fill library shelves with the books (or flash drives with ebooks).  I’ll bet if I go look, I can find an article on the Internet on how to do just that.                      

*

Note:  I looked up gangbusters.  Together as one word, it means law enforcement that breaks up organized criminal groups.  But separated as in Gang Busters© it was a radio show, television show and movie about criminal cases.

*