One More Day by Martha Reed

As a creative writer, I’m amazed when I can turn on my focus, edit my hopefully soon-to-be-finished manuscript for three hours, look up from my keyboard, and find myself in the same paragraph.

Where does my mind go for those hours? When I’m in the writing zone it feels like an alternate universe. I know I’m world-building and developing fully fleshed out characters who behave in a logical and plausible fashion. True, sometimes their decisions and actions are wrong, but that’s what makes them human. As the writer, my job is to create the plot, and the plot needs to be plausible. No divine intervention or dropped secret correspondence or lucky guesses.

I heard a memorable quote once: "The brain that painted you into the corner is the same brain that will get you out of it."

I finished the second draft of my third NOLA Mystery on Saturday, July 19^th. I was humming along nicely and finishing the final fifty pages when I hit a Big Snag. Suddenly, the developing storyline became too tightly wrapped. One character was sharing information that she could not have known. I spent a day trying to fix the knot when I realized that I was too focused on finishing the book that day. I needed to give myself some breathing room to allow my subconscious time to play with the idea and come up with a solution.

So, with the deadline looming over me like the sword of Damocles, I took a day off and played hooky.

What did I do? Regular human things. I went for a stroll around the lake in the park and enjoyed a particularly beautiful summer’s day. Grocery shopping at a distant market. Laundry detail. I cooked a real dinner. And then, on Sunday when I sat down to work I had my answer: Put it off for a day.

I edited my plot and my timeline to give my characters an extra day in their investigation. It was more realistic: Coroner’s departments and lab results don’t normally operate at the speed I was insisting on. That delay (and subsequent character frustration) added additional realism. That extra twenty-four hours also gave my characters 1,000 words to catch their breath. To sit down with each other and discuss the investigation. The pros, the cons, the ‘what could have happened’, the ‘whodunnit,’ and the ‘what could it mean?’.

And since I was letting that plot point gel, I followed some other writerly advice. I worked on my ending and then I edited my way backwards from the ending to where I was stuck. What I discovered was an easy fix: I had duplicated the knotty plot point later in the story timeline where it worked better. Correcting the issue was easily done. I hit delete.

I’ve made a note of this writerly hack for the future. Next time I find myself wound too tight, I’m going to take a step back, pause, and look at the bigger picture. Instead of trying to micro-fix the problem right then and there, maybe the answer lies somewhere later on the page.

Do you ever lose yourself in your writing? Do you have any tricks for getting unstuck?