Into the Mist… And Off the Cliff

I’m writing this blog post a full two weeks before it’s due, which is unheard of for someone like me, who always does things last minute. Why am I ahead of the game this time?  Simple. Writing a blog post is better than gazing at my muddle of a manuscript. Or agonizing over the fact that this disastrous project is due at my publisher’s in a little more than a month.

I’m a few chapters from the end (I hope) where I am horribly stuck. I’ve been like this for two weeks, one of which I took off from work with the express goal of sprinting to the end of the story. Instead, I wrote a measly twenty pages, most of which I’m going to have to discard and/or rewrite extensively.

I’ve come to this pass because I don’t plot my books. I’d like to plot. No, I’d actually love to plot my stories. I just can’t. The creative part of my brain doesn’t seem to work that way. So I write into the mist… and sometimes end up falling off the plotting cliff.

Now I’m on the side of the plotting cliff, clinging to life on a flimsy branch, while the twin villains of anxiety and depression get out their machetes and start hacking away at my precarious support. I look down and imagine tumbling into the abyss below. I’m unnerved enough that I decide to set the manuscript aside for a day and focus on something else. Anything to distract the villains in my head from their goal of destroying me.

But eventually, I have to sit at my desk and resume the battle. It goes like this:

I tell myself I’ve been here before.

But never this close to a deadline, the villains answer.

I take a deep breath and remind myself to trust in the process.

The villains take another whack at the thin branch, telling me I’m old and the creativity that always got me through is all used up.

I advise myself to step back and look at the story arc and the book as a whole.

The villains’ response: You’re just wasting more time, you useless, talent-less fool.

I try to convince myself they’re wrong. I haven’t wasted my time writing these unusable pages. I tell myself I needed to write them to discover important parts of the story.

The villains snigger. Yeah, right. You went off on a tangent and now your characters are floundering. You wasted two weeks of good writing time, and now you’ll never catch up.

It goes on like this, back and forth, like a tense action scene in a movie. But in a movie, you know the heroine will prevail in the end and manage to not only climb back up on the cliff, but defeat the villains. The outcome is less certain here.

Even in the movies, sometimes the heroine needs a little help. Someone to come up behind the bad guys and shove them over the cliff and give the beleaguered heroine a hand up. Who can I hope will rescue me? Will it be my writer friends who reassure and support me that I can do this? The years of writing experience, reminding me I’ve been in this spot dozens of times before? Or maybe the advice I once got from Nora Roberts:  “When you write yourself into a corner, you just have to write yourself out again.”

I stare up at the villains, willing them to disappear. They waver and fade until they’re nearly transparent. They never entirely go away, but are shadows that will always be there, haunting me. And then, with the stubbornness and determination that has kept me going in this business for over twenty-five years, I thrust myself up from the branch and claw my way back onto the cliff. And keep writing.