The Freeze

Writer's block really isn't the inability to write, in the cartoony blank-page-on-the-typewriter sense. Not for me, at least. What I get is the certain conviction that the scene I'm about to write won't be any good. Instead of writing it, I feel like I should wait until I can write it well.

Except that time never comes, and the scene just gets built up in my head as an insurmountable obstacle of suck that I'll never get over.

It's the Freeze. Last year, I got distracted from my writing on Bryony's Market because of a Devan scene I just couldn't get a handle on. I put it off by a day, two days, and suddenly it was ten months later. I wound up changing up the whole scene anyway.

I hate the Freeze, because it's what's keeping me from getting to the better parts of my story. If only I could get past this one scene, I think, everything would be all right.

The freeze can hit at the beginning of a project, too. I spent months developing the project I call Dairhenien's Library, working out elaborate world-building and character outlines and the like, without every actually starting the story. Eventually, the bulk of all that world-building weighed me under so much that I backed off of the project.

What was I thinking? I was so afraid that the finished story wouldn't live up to the really cool stuff I had developed, and as a result, I just didn't start. I've got lots of great notes out there. Someday, maybe after I finish Bryony, I'll pick them up again.

And that brings me to today. The upcoming scene is one that I don't believe I'll be able to write well. And so I've been spending the last twenty minutes writing this blog post, and started thinking about researching magazine fiction markets instead of writing today. If I were a cat, I should get squirted with a spray bottle for that kind of thinking.

I'm going to write the scene. And there is a very good chance it won't come out well. I'll shake my head and move on. A year from now, or whenever it is that I revise this story, I'll come back and do it right.

But here's the thing--I'll have accomplished so much in that year. For the last year, I stopped until I felt able to tackle the scene, and did nothing on the story in the interval. I was trying to compose the story linearly.

The reader may read the story that way, but why do I have to write it that way? It'd be like building a car front to back, or painting a picture like an ink jet printer, top to bottom.

All right, enough of this small talk. Let's write.