I’ve been avoiding the obvious for the past couple days. By this I mean that I’ve been working on this book, and struggling to get what I’ve been considering The Last Big Piece of the puzzle to fall. (Please note, that when I say “Last Big Piece”, what I really mean is “Latest Barrier Keeping Me from Progressing,” We all know there will be more barriers, but I ignore that fact today in an attempt to keep my emotional sanity as I go through the discovery process associated with this work of, er, … art). I’ve been sitting here each morning and not getting a lot of anything put on paper because I’ve been looking at this LBP, seeing how much of a beast it is, and only coming up with one solution.
This “one solution” is generally a problem.
For years and years I’ve drilled myself to discard the first answer to various situations because the first answer is generally trite and, well, obvious. If you want your fiction to be interesting, the thought goes, don’t settle for your first idea. So I’ve been down here searching for an alternate and more surprising answer to my LBP dilemma.
Each fifteen or twenty minutes I would say to the story: “How about we try this?” And the story would reply: “That sucks.” And I would say: “Hey, humor me and try it out for a couple paragraphs.” Not being able to defend itself, the story would try my idea out for size and eventually say: “I told you this wasn’t going to work.”
Today I finally decided to give in.
I wrote a paragraph that led down the obvious path. It felt pretty good. So I wrote another and another. Next thing you know I felt the familiar sensation of having things moving again.
Perhaps, I thought, this was the obvious answer because it just flat-out makes the story work.
Feel free to ignore the smirking story behind the green curtains.
By simply adjusting the questions you ask when taking care of your life, you can instantly change your focus