Posted on February 21, 2018
I am one of those writers who gets so caught up in trying to focus on writing that I neglect all the other things I’m suppose to be doing to help promote said writing. One of those things is letting people know what I’m up to.
What I’ve been up to is trying to finish book three, Tomb of the Fallen, of my Soulstone Prophecy Series. It is all plotted out and rough drafted, now I’m going through the process of rewriting each chapter, or as I like to refer to it, writing up hill.
For me, rough drafting is like running down hill. You just need to keep your feet beneath you and let gravity do the rest. When I write like that, I am often surprised by what I find on the paper when I return to it later. It also keeps me away from those fearful words, writer’s block.
I’m not so lucky when I return to those pages and start rewriting (The going up hill part). I sometimes run into a chapter that is really hard to rewrite. I don’t know if it is what other writers experience when they say they are suffering from writer’s block, but it is the closest thing I have come to my understanding of it.
This is where the choice of “Using the Force” and just powering through the chapter, writing until reaching the end or just accepting that the chapter is difficult to write because it isn’t right and admitting it. That is my “Let it Go” approach. I am on one of those chapters now in Tomb of the Fallen and it is what resulted in me taking a break from the chapter and writing my thoughts on the matter this post.
It is a chapter where the Lord Knight Justice Gyldoon is trying to force the Judges Council of Daomount to accept that the Time of the Stonechosen has indeed come and enact the law that turns leadership over to the Temple of Justice (him) during that time. It seemed simple enough when I rough drafted it. I knew I needed to show things from the dwarf perspective, do a little foreshadowing for some upcoming events, share the bureaucracy permeating dwarven government (world building), and close the reader/writer contract concerning Gyldoon.
Unfortunately, the chapter, as written, was resisting me sentence by sentence. Nothing was flowing and I found I was spending way more time on this one chapters than any three others combined. That is when I realized it was one of “those” chapters and I had to “Let it Go”. So, I did. I stepped back, and started over by asking myself what my point of view (POV) character was thinking and trying to accomplish in the first place.
That change of perspective was all I needed to open the creative flood gates. So, I’m back on track and another chapter closer to finishing book three.
Back to writing….