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Monthly Archives: November 2010

Writer’s Block

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This fall, I’m getting back into writing after a nearly two year gap due to my husband’s stroke. It has been a rough reentry, but I’m feeling happy and productive again. I’m also thinking a lot about writer’s block, because things that helped me get over it before have helped me again this fall.

Let me clarify what I mean by writer’s block. I’m not talking about what happens with people who have been members of a writing organization for years and still haven’t completed and submitted a manuscript. That is writer’s block, but not a sort I feel qualified to write about.

Professional writers (regardless of publication status) learn to show up for work on a regular basis. The beauty of it is that writing begets more writing. You draft a crappy scene in the morning, then you go about your day job or errands and seemingly out of the blue, you get ideas for how to fix that scene and go on to the next. You ask why your hero is a loner and the next morning you wake up knowing.

What is going on is a partnership between your conscious and subconscious minds. It’s not always perfect, of course. Sometimes you need 10-20 minutes of warmup before the writing starts to flow. Sometimes you need to take a break to brainstorm a plot snag or murky character motivation. Sometimes you just have a bad day. These are minor blocks; you develop tricks to get through them. And when it’s going well, it feels great. Like an athlete who is in the zone, you are still working and sweating, but the work feels good and productive.

The writer’s block I’m talking happens when you are showing up for work but the ideas slow down or stop coming. At first you may think it’s just a bad day. But it happens again, over a period of weeks or even months. Your characters no longer feel real. They’re more like mannequins you laboriously push through their paces. You lose your gut feel for what works. You don’t know what to keep, change or cut.

What’s happened is like an athletic injury. Unlike a swollen ankle, you can’t see it. But it’s real. Your subconscious mind is on strike.

If you keep going, in a deadline crunch or just out of perseverance, you’re like an athlete compounding an injury. You start to associate writing with pain. You may have trouble finishing a book or starting the next one. It hurts like being at outs with your best friend. You may fall into depression and bad habits.

You could give up or wait it out, but I think it’s better to treat it as a professional athlete would an injury, with rest and therapy. You need to be both kind and tough.

The kind part means getting good sleep, nutrition and exercise if you weren’t already. It could mean massage, meditation, long walks or anything that makes you feel good and clears your mind. You need mental clarity for the tough part.

The tough part is figuring out what caused the block and what to do about it. Some writers say blocks are mysterious but I think one can figure them out. I find journaling (a process I first learned by doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron) helpful. I also talk through blocks with trusted writer friends. Some writers go to a therapist. (I think it’d be very important to find a good one.)

Blocks are caused by fear. It could be fear of rejection, decreasing sales, bad reviews, of not being able to do justice to your ideas, of your friends being jealous if your career progresses faster than theirs. If you fear being punished in some way for writing, your subconscious mind “protects” you by not sending any more ideas.

You can’t just dismiss your fears. Bad things do happen to good writers. You may have to teach yourself that you are strong enough to cope. You may have to work on surrounding yourself with supportive people but also learn to support yourself, too. You may want to change your career plan or writing process. Maybe you need to switch genres. Maybe you need to allow more time for each book.

While you’re doing all this, it’s also a good idea to try what Julia Cameron calls an “Artist Date”. Make time for a fun, creative activity that has no career baggage. It could be something you used to enjoy, or always wanted to try but haven’t had time for. Consider it a peace offering to your creative side.

Once you start back into the writing, be patient. Continue to take care of yourself and trust your gut.

So anyway, this is my theory on writer’s block. What do you think? If you’ve had it, what helped? If you haven’t, do you do things to prevent it?

Elena

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Thankful for Boots and Arlo

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So Carolyn talked this week about the fashion difference between East and West Coasts in terms of boot wearage, and the day she posted this–before I had even read it–I went and bought a pair of knee-high black boots (these are the VERY ONES I got).

Because, as Carolyn so astutely points out, that is how we roll on this side of the country.

Earlier this week, I sent my agent the novella I’ve been working on FOR EVER, the one I did a short excerpt of a few weeks back. And since then have done no fiction writing, but am THINKING awfully hard about it. Not that that counts.

The Thanksgiving holiday arrives next week, which means that I won’t have to cook for a few days! That is likely what I am most thankful for. I hope to catch up on sleep and hanging out with my husband, too, during those few days off.

One thing that will definitely happen on Thanksgiving is listening to Arlo Guthrie‘s “Alice’s Restaurant;” it’s a Thanksgiving tradition my family and I used to have, and now my husband has taken it up, which is so sweet. So we’ll listen to “the circles and arrows on the back of each one” and laugh on our drive down to South Jersey for turkey.

Of course the food is lovely, too, but I think the annual listening is my favorite part. What does your family do special at Thanksgiving? What are you thankful for?

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Recent discoveries

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I’m still on deadline and I am so looking forward to getting this book finished! In December I’m going to play … many Jane Austen activities of course since her birthday is on December 16 (and yes, we’ll be celebrating here too!).

But I have been doing a few other things that I wanted to share with you. First, I’m reading My Lady Ludlow by Mrs. Gaskell, one of her shorter and neglected novels, part of which was used to flesh out the wonderful BBC Cranford. It’s set in the first few years of the nineteenth century and is a wonderful series of snapshots of country life (Mrs. Gaskell was born in 1810 so I like to imagine she’s gathering together everything she’s heard about the good old days). Some of it is surprising. First, here’s a description of a gown and a use of pocket holes (slits to accommodate the pockets, discrete items which hung inside from the petticoat) I’ve never heard before:

She had a fine Indian muslin shawl folded over her shoulders and across her chest and an apron of the same; a black silk mode gown made with short sleeves and ruffles, and with the tail thereof pulled through the pocket-hole, so as to shorten it to a useful length: beneath it she wore, as I could plainly see, a quilted lavender satin petticoat.

Or how about this? Have you ever heard of this particular fashion craze?

Nor would my lady sanction the fashion of the day, which, at the beginning of this century, made all the fine ladies take to making shoes. She said that such work was a consequence of the French Revolution, which had done much to annihilate all distinctions of rank and class, and hence it was that she saw young ladies of birth and breeding handling lasts, and awls, and dirty cobbling-wax, like shoe-makers’ daughters.

She’s very much old school, absolutely opposed to anything that will upset the social order–and this is a decade after the Reign of Terror, so she was probably fairly representative. Here’s a description of her hiring a servant, which gives a really fascinating insight into master/servant relationships:

… Then she would bid her say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. Then she inquired if she could write. If she could, and she had liked all that had gone before, her face sank–it was a great disappointment for it was an all but inviolable rule with her never to engage a servant who could write. But I have know her ladyship break through it, although in both cases in which she did so she put the girl’s principles to a further and unusual test in asking her to repeat the Ten Commandments. One pert young woman–and yet I was sorry for her too, only she afterwards married a rich draper in Shrewsbury–who had got through her trials pretty tolerably, considering she could write, spoilt al, by saying glibly, at the end of the last Commandment, “An’t please your ladyship, I can cast accounts.”

“Go away, wench,” said my lady in a hurry, “you’re only fit for trade; you will not suit me for a servant.”

I’ve been enjoying the documentary series Circus on PBS–enjoying in the sense that I’ve seen snippets of them–really fascinating stuff. When I’m less busy I hope to catch them all.

And I’ve also started a singing group in my town, which is a wonderful, exciting project. Our lineup so far is five altos and one bass-baritone which is a bit limiting, but we have plans to go hunt down men (particularly tenors). This too was inspired by a British TV series, The Choir, in which a choirmaster, Gareth Malone, went into unlikely environments full of people who claimed they “can’t sing” and got them singing, enjoying it, and performing.

What are you doing for fun these days? Have you seen either of these TV shows? What’s your favorite Mrs. Gaskell?

Don’t forget to enter the LOLRegencies contest! Win valuable prizes!

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Regency Weddings

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Today I’m on the road, traveling back home from a family wedding this weekend. So, because I’m thinking about weddings, I’ve adapted a blog I wrote a couple of years ago for Harlequin Romance authors who had a blog promoting their series, The Wedding Planners. I was their guest blogger, talking about Regency Weddings.

I was married a brazillion years ago, long before I started writing or reading Regency romance. It wasn’t too long ago I realized I actually had a Regency Wedding!

Here I am with my bridesmaids. Notice that our dresses are all empire-waisted. Notice the leg-o-mutton sleeves on my dress and the puffed sleeves on the bridesmaids dresses.

Now compare these dresses to two Regency Fashion Prints from the fashion magazines of 1815.

See the similarities?

I had a Regency Wedding!

And you can have a Regency Wedding, too. There are many sites on the internet offering custom made Regency wedding dresses. Here are two of them:

Regency Reproductions

Fashions in Time

Or if you are handy you could make your Regency gown:

McCall’s Pattern M6030

In fact, if you so desire, you can have a Regency wedding in one of the historic sites in the UK.

This is St. George’s, the church on Havover Square in Mayfair, London, where many Regency lords and ladies held their weddings. You can, too.

You can also have your wedding in the Prince Regent’s summer home, the Brighton Pavilion in Brighton Hove.

In a room like this:

If that is too fussy for you, or if you must marry in a hurry, like many couples in Regency Romances, you can elope to Gretna Green over the border in Scotland. Here I am standing at the historic anvil. Regency couples were married “over the anvil” in Gretna Green.
No, this isn’t another wedding photo. It is me with the tour guide at Gretna Green when I visited in 2005. I’m holding a copy of The Wagering Widow which began with a Gretna Green wedding.

How about it? Have I convinced you to have a Regency Wedding?

Ask me any questions you like about Regency Weddings, but I won’t be home until after 7 pm. I’ll let you know then how this wedding was. What do you think? Do you think the bride will have worn: a) Leg o’ mutton sleeves b) empire waist dress c) stapless dress?

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Ideal Characters

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A few weeks back, the Smart Bitches asked for reader opinions to help in writing a chapter for a book “Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels.” The specific question was what traits readers associate with the ideal romance hero and heroine. Life was too busy that week for me to even read all the responses, let alone partake in the discussion. But I thought it was an interesting question.

Now that I’ve read the comments, I see that there are lots of common themes: intelligence, humor, and the ability to make sacrifices for the other. Yet something in the discussion disturbed me until I figured it out.

My creative self isn’t comfortable with the concept of an ideal hero or heroine. I doubt the SBs meant it this way, but if readers were to reach consensus on the ideal, should all romance authors should aim for the same goal, book after book? If the alpha hero is the ideal (as some readers say) should we never write beta heroes?

IMHO all heroes and heroines should be innately good people. What I want in heroes and heroines is variety. Jessica and Dain from Loretta Chase’s LORD OF SCOUNDRELS are not much like Maddy and Christian from Laura Kinsale’s FLOWERS OF THE STORM. Both books are firmly on my keeper shelf.

What I can define a little more easily is my deal-breakers. I used to have more of them, but books like Laura Kinsale’s SHADOWHEART made me reconsider. Now it’s a short list. I can’t deal with heroes or heroines who are:

  • Small-minded or petty. No kicking dogs, please.
  • Distant and cold throughout the entire story. Some alpha heroes come off this way to me. I want to see even the toughest guy break down when he thinks he’s lost the love of his life.
  • Apathetic. No heroes or heroines who are just waiting for the other to heal them.
  • Racist, homophobic, or intolerant in any way, especially if the author seems to support the intolerance and doesn’t make them change.

Beyond those deal-breakers, I really just want to know why a hero is right for that heroine and not someone else, and vice versa. Like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, they should have opposing traits that drive them crazy but also make them grow.

What about you? Are there specific traits you expect in a hero or heroine? What are your deal-breakers?

Elena

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