Writer's Digest Helps Me Deal With Writer's Block

Last week started out with a creativity renewal. I was quite productive.

With draft #3, I am splitting up a lot of the chapters in draft #2 in separate, shorter (and sometimes fleshed-out, due to necessity of character development) chapters. There are also some new scenes, which I hope will enrich the plot. I was able to get up to draft #3 of chapter 9. But after that, my creativity made the fatal mistake to go sky-diving. Creativity met up with a gory ending.

Let's hope these skydivers had a more successful sky dive than Creativity did!

How am I dealing with this? Well, first, I read my September 2012 issue of Writer's Digest. It has Chris Cleave on the cover, but what really stood out to me about the issue's cover were the captions "7 Strategies for More Productive Writing" and "Learn to Be Creative on Demand."

I'm going to make a shout-out to the articles "How to be Creative on Demand" by Roger Morris and "7 Steps to a Foolproof Revision" by Don Fry. In Morris's article, one tip that stood out to me was...

Tip #2: Pump Your Skills of Observation
EXCERPT: ...Why not hone your skills of description?....Whether you're practicing by describing a restaurant's decor as you're waiting for a table, or a stunning landscape you're enjoying on vacation, use a mixture of comparisons and contrasts, plus well-picked adjectives and adverbs.

This brought back a memory from age 12, when my family and I were going for a car ride to somewhere. We were on the highway, the sun was setting, and the sky was violet, pricked with burning streaks like firebirds' tails. My mom challenged my brother and I to come up with a description of the sky.

From Fry's article:

Tip #1: Complete Your Draft, Then Revise
...it's safe to say that the longest (and ultimately the most frustrating) way to revise is to just keep writing sentences and revising them, and changing anything your revision damages.
So what's the fastest way? In my experience, it's this: Draft the entire piece with no revision whatsoever, and then revise the whole thing, start to finish (sometimes twice, if you have the time).

Holy cow, this is already what I do! This is generally how I deal with my writing, whether it's essays, short stories, poems, or even my novel. I just go through the entire thing, try to slash my way through pesky thorns, and then go back to revise and clean up.

Oh gosh, I can't resist Disney references, but........

I wish revising was this effortless...

...and not like this!

Listening to lots and lots of metal is helping too.

"Motherzone" by Deathstars

"Storms" by Siebenburgen

Well, time to get back to Chapter 14! If you guys remember my blog post "Dancing With a Paraplegic," the ball scene, the scene in which my paraplegic character Princess Isolda, is now Chapter 14.