The Dead Zone

by Janis Patterson

We’ve all been there. We’re writing along happily on a book when suddenly - ZAP! - everything stops. It doesn’t matter if you have a minutely detailed outline or are a free-wheeling pantser or anything in between. Everything just stops. The well is dry. Ideas are things that happen to other people. The storyline that has carried you along so wonderfully, the storyline that was perfect and carefully crafted suddenly becomes a mis-matched pile of unconnected - and unacceptable - actions that have no relationship to each other or to any coherent tale.

Determined to work your way past this bump, you stare at the computer screen.

Like the single eye of a particularly malign deity, the computer screen stares back at you.

Impasse. 

The reasons for this sudden and apparently impassible roadblock can be legion. The idea you thought was so perfect has suddenly revealed its hidden and insuperable flaws. You’re coming down with something. Influences/events in your real and everyday life are taking precedence. There are more valid reasons, almost as many as there are writers, and most of them are very real. Admittedly, some are conscious or unconscious excuses, but some are completely, sadly, totally real. Those are the ones we have to look out for. 

It is hard to concentrate on creating a fictional problem among fictional people who live in a fictional world - one that you created - when in your real actual life someone gets sick or your job goes away or there is a disaster threatening or perhaps even destroying your property or your life (metaphorical or physical). Fortunately, though, it seems that most of these distractors are, while distracting, are not so overwhelming.

Some call this sudden and absolute stoppage writer’s block. I don’t, but I don’t have a better term. Others call it burnout, which I don’t think it is. My problem is with this particular manuscript, not the process of writing as a whole. Either way, my go-tos are a cup of coffee, maybe a couple of hours of mindless TV or a nice long soak in the hot tub - which right now, sadly, is denied to me as it is on the fritz. Sob. Others may play with the children/grandchildren, take in a movie, take a nice long walk, go into a cooking frenzy, or anything else that particular person chooses. Often this works, and if it does you’re lucky. 

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t. Two or three or more days go by in this eyeball/screen staring contest and no progress is made. After a while, some writers simply put this project aside and go on to another, something new and shiny and so perfect it will never shatter so spectacularly on them. (Yeah.) Some writers will grit their teeth and forge on through, putting down word after painful word with all the same speed and ease as pulling teeth, even as they know it is garbage that will have to be deleted. Other writers will... well, there are as many answers to that as there are writers.

And perhaps, just perhaps, this death of a manuscript is normal and necessary. Not all projects can be or should be brought to fruition. 

But how do we know? I dunno. I can’t really answer for myself, let alone for all writers everywhere. I just know that everything I have said is at some time, in some place, to some (most? all?) authors true. And we just have to deal with it to the best of our abilities at the time.

After all, if writing were easy, everyone would be doing it.

And for those of you following my republishing blitz, all is going just as planned. Today’s release is a contemporary romance called CHRISTMAS CACTUS. THE HOUSE WITH THE RED DOOR, a gothic/ghost story set in contemporary South Carolina, releases August 30. A traditional Regency romance called THE RESURRECTION OF REGINA releases September 13. Annnnnnnd - an international romantic adventure called THE JERUSALEM CONNECTION is on sale for only 99 cents from now through Saturday, August 19.