I’ve just come out on the other side of a dreadful case of writer’s block. For the longest time, if I actually sat down to write, I would stare at the screen, watching the cursor, waiting for inspiration. The experience was so frustrating, I wouldn’t make time to write again for a while.
It was easy enough to avoid. I have my regular work to do, the stuff I get paid for. Working at home can offer lots of opportunities for distraction if I let it. Then there’s just real life. I am the family administrator by default; I’m the one with more flexibility.
Recently, though, when I sat down to write, I had a revelation. My problem was writers’ block, but it wasn’t due to lack of inspiration. It was due to lack of knowledge. The section of the book I am working on now is the section that requires a lot of experience or information I don’t have.
In this section of the book, Jake is sailing. I don’t know much about sailing a boat. He’s sailing in geographic areas I don’t know. These are things I can’t make up. If I do and I get it wrong, I’ll lose credibility with readers who do know those things. Once that happens, I’ll lose those readers.
So, I’m back at work on research. I’m surfing the web, I’m looking up all sorts of things on Wikipedia, and I’m reading books. I’m reading travel guides and I’m reading memoirs of people who have sailed on adventures similar to Jake’s.
How long does it take to sail from Point A to Point B? What might you see? What could go wrong? Knowing the answers to these questions and more is helping me move my story forward.
I’m working on Section 7 of the book. I haven’t decided if these are chapters, parts, or books, but there are eight altogether. When I am through the eighth, I’ll make another pass through. Then I expect to have a cohesive first draft. I’m pretty sure they say the first draft is the hardest. I hope so.
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Once I started, the scene flowed smoothly. It did go a different way than I expected. Sometimes characters do that, they take the story or scene in a new direction.
I chose 
The next day, I decided to try it out. I re-wrote the first scene in the book. I liked it. First person gave me a better way to share information. It started out as an exercise of changing pronouns, but before long, the characters had more to say.
Since I started my book, I wondered what the ending should be. It was approaching hurricane season. There were pirates in the area. The boat was a large one to sail alone. He could have faked his disappearance.
A few years ago, I joined a local writing group at the library. There were probably 25 people in the group and I think we met twice a month. After a few visits, I gave up. There were just too many people. We only shared our writing every three or four meeting because there were so many of us. Also, I think it made the members less invested in one another’s work. Lots of criticism, little support.
We started meeting late last year and I believe we will really hit our stride in the next few months. We are at different points in our books, but we seem to be helpful to one another anyway. We also write from a couple different genres and that’s OK, too.
Rhonda Kalkwarf 