I’ve been having some difficulties writing the last few days. I suppose that if I don’t have an idea about what’s going to happen next in the story, I have less of a desire to write something up.

Two days ago, I almost had to force myself to write. In relation to one of my previous posts (Stumped), I finally chose to stall somewhat by changing viewpoints and showing something else. So, I decided to push some more on the romance part and began to write a scene where the father and the would-be son in law are waiting for the daughter to come up – they have lured her in to try to hammer some sense into her. This started as a simple conversation between the two men with the father producing the usual overwhelming conversation and driving the young pretendent mad.

That went slowly to say the least (no numbers here, but it was perhaps half of what I usually do). Writing is hard sometimes.

Then, during the night, an idea struck me. I now know how I’m going to finish the act – this should be an heroic moment for one of my side characters.

This idea has nothing to do with the scene I’m currently writing, but somehow, it unlocked my ability to write. I found myself last night writing furiously and revealing more of the characters background that I already had before. Ok, we knew something bad had happened in the past, but now, we have one of the witnesses telling the story. It was quite moving to write – I hope this moves the reader as well.

So, we’re out of the woods for the time being, writing is back!

On another note, I’m advancing in my “on writing” audiobook. Stephen King is quite fascinating. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but he’s like the archetype of discovery writers. He writes without outlines and talks very sternly about plots. Apparently, he has an idea about the setting and writes from that point on, without knowing where the characters will go. His relation of the ideas leading to his writing of “Misery” are quite interesting in that regard.

I don’t think that I will ever be like that – writing without outline. I seem to need to know at least some keypoints of the story and I write towards these keypoints. If along the way, the characters take me another way, I’m pleased and I’ll go along, but I’ll adjust the outline accordingly, so that I always have an idea about where to go next.

Maybe that will change with time, but for the time being, I need that safety net of my skeletal outlines…