So you’ve written yourself into a corner. Your hero has jumped from a burning building onto a ledge a hundred feet up and the water is a puddle about four inches across . . . and it’s two hundred yards from the tower. Now what?
Well that sucks. First, shame on you for making them plunge to their death, ending the book abruptly. Just kidding . . . it happens to the best of us, in fact all of us at some point. You get excited, you want to keep the reader on edge and you shove your protagonist(s) into some crazy nonsense.
The worst is when you’ve set something up seventy pages back you can’t get around. OR worse—you’ve set up a premise and in getting toward the end, you realize you’ve forgotten some detail and are totally screwed (you know, like your entire story hinges on no photos of the body at the crime scene when you forgot it’s the 21st century and practically everyone has a cell phone in their pocket).
And while I don’t write mysteries, I have definitely put a literary noose around my neck and stepped onto a desk more than once. Writing is not an easy endeavor but it is easy to forget the details of the world once you start down a path, thinking you’ve got a real killer of an idea.
I definitely think it’s why I enjoy the fantasy genre and magic. I can control the rules of what works and what won’t—as long as I supply a good line of reasoning which is logical and makes sense up front. I can start a story with the premise that all fire magic is shut down because Enastri the Fire Goddess has turned her back on humanity and will not release the secrets of fire magic again. Of course, it screws my heroine over on page 192, when a fire spell would really save her butt as she and her pals are about to be decimated by a horde of rookrawgs . . .
First thing I do when I discover a major “oops” is to panic. Your mind instantly reminds you how many days, weeks and hours you’ve spent on this story . . . and goes fetal. Then I sit there staring at the screen asking my brain why it didn’t point this out to me back in February when I could have shifted the plot.
The next step is the most important: you close the file and walk away. You’re not mentally prepared to deal with the cataclysm anyway, and if you try to write your way out, I guarantee you’ll just get more frustrated. SO—walk away. Leave it. Do something non-writing related and absolutely don’t let yourself go back to it for . . . at least a couple of days.
Give yourself time to calm down. You’ll know when. When you become rational again, you can start turning it over in your head. Don’t open the file yet—It will kick you back into freak out mode. No—just think about the problem, sift through what you need to overcome and walk away again.
I trust my creative side to work on my behalf. If I give it some space and time, it will give me something to work with. MAYBE not enough I don’t have to go back and do some rewriting, but I know it will give me something. It gave me the story idea in the first place—I know it has the plan. It’s just that somewhere along the way, I strayed off the path.
It’s okay. And this is the next big step. Stop beating yourself up over your miscalculation. It happens. The key is not spinning in panic mode. Trust your creative side. You write for a reason—you see the worlds you write in and think in different ways than non-writers. Give yourself some space and you can get out of it. Promise.
Go back to the story when a possibility comes—something that may save your butt. Or in a few days, do open it up (even if no solutions are presenting themselves) and read through what you’ve got from page one to crisis. Just rereading your material may spark ideas to get you out of your predicament.
The final step is just as important—you don’t give up on it. Don’t walk away and not come back because you’re scared of dealing with it. Face the monster and figure out its weakness. All monsters have one.
Other things you can do:
–Do a little research on your problem, if possible—sometimes learning more about a subject can give you other ideas.
–lay it out for another writer friend. Most of us have them and with us writers, our creative brains might be able to think of something you haven’t. Heck, if you don’t have anyone, email me and I will try my damnedest to see if I can help you figure it out.
–write down a list of possibilities—even if you know they won’t work. Many times working on the problem at all, even from the edges starts your brain working on the solution.
Just like Captain Kirk didn’t believe in the Kobayashi Maru, I don’t either (just for the record, I’m not a huge Trekkie, I just always remember Kirk cheating to win and liked his changing the rules to show the rest of Star Fleet you don’t have to be a nincompoop). The solution is there otherwise your muse wouldn’t have led you there. Sometimes you do have to do some rewriting, but that just makes it a stronger story later on.
When you do figure it out—and trust me, you will—do two things. Pat yourself on the back when you’ve got everything straightened out. Seriously, you got yourself out of a mess and kudos to you. It’s not easy.
The second thing you do is remember the mess. It will serve you again the next time you send your hero off in a burning ship with no islands around for leagues. You overcame it once, you can do it again.
I’ve got faith in you.
Craig