Author Susan Meissner ~ Writer's Block

Susan Meissner is a multi-published author, speaker and writing workshop leader with a background in community journalism. Her books include The Shape of Mercy, Blue Heart Blessed, and A Window to the World, named by Booklist magazine as one of the Top Ten Christian novels for 2005. When she's not writing, Susan directs the Small Groups and Connection Ministries program at her San Diego church.

After a two-week road trip through Western Europe, my Air Force husband and I — we were stationed overseas at the time — were ready to board the ferry at Bruges and head back to England. We’d had a wonderful trip, but we missed our kids (ages one and three back then), my husband’s leave was up, and we had spent the money we’d brought with us. But on our way back to the coast, the radiator in our car had a meltdown on a very busy expressway outside Brussels. We found ourselves stranded on the side of the road in a foreign country, unable to speak the local language, with a dated ferry ticket in my purse and miles of land and water between us and where we wanted to be.

We felt powerless and lost. We wanted to be moving, making progress, heading west, closing in our destination. And instead we were stuck.

I hated that feeling.

If you’re a writer, you know how frustrating it is to suddenly feel stranded in your manuscript. Unable to move forward. Up against a wall. Stuck. There are few pairs of words that strike fear into the heart of a novelist like “writer’s block.”

To hit a wall when you’re writing is akin to falling into Bunyan’s Slough of Despair. One moment you’re cranking out pages and the next you are staring at your computer screen, bereft of inspiration.

Logic tells us when we hit a wall, we need to pick up a sledgehammer or a pick ax and either pound through it or scale it somehow. But I’ve learned in my own writing journey that we novelists have the God-like ability to move through time. We can go backwards. When you are stuck on a Belgian expressway your only option is to find a way to move forward or live the rest of your life stranded on the side of the road. Not so the writer. In fact, I’ve found that when I hit a wall in my manuscript, one of the best things I can do is go backward. Forget the sledgehammer and pick ax. Forget pounding my way through the wall. I go back to the point in time when the writing was flowing, back to the last plot pivot. And I find the place in the road where I destined my characters to crash at the wall. Then I make a turn. And I reroute a journey that takes them to a different place where I see no wall on the horizon.

Let’s say, for sake of illustration, when she wrote Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell hit a wall. Let’s say when Scarlett went looking for Rhett to get money to pay the taxes on Tara, she found him not in an Atlanta jail but living it up in the North. Let’s say Margaret had Scarlett marry Rhett right then and began to live a Yankee life. Let’s say several chapters go by and the plot begins to flatline. Margaret has hit a wall. The story is going nowhere. She is uninspired as she sits down to write. She feels stranded. Instead of pounding her way through the wall, she looks in her rearview mirror and steps back to the last place where the plot pivoted. It may be five or six chapters back. But she finds it. And she realizes if she places Rhett in a jail and unable to help Scarlett, Scarlett must do something else to get the money. And so Margaret has Scarlett marry Frank Kennedy, her sister’s beau — a man she has not a thimbleful of attraction for.

Margaret made Scarlett do something that rankled us, jarred us, annoyed us, shocked us. She made her do something that moved the plot forward to a new place where no wall was waiting.

When I was pre-writing The Shape of Mercy, when the idea for it was just beginning to gel, I attended a writing clinic by legendary agent and writing mentor, Donald Maass. In one exercise, he told us to identify the one thing our character would never do. Never.

Then make them do it, he said.

My first reaction was to balk. Resist. Refuse. But since it was just an exercise and I could erase it all with a tap of a finger, I went ahead and did what he said. I made Lauren, the college student who is transcribing the 300-year-old diary of a victim of the Salem Witch Trials, do the thing she would never do.

It was a delicious maneuver. Honestly. I saved that snippet, wondering if I would be able to use it. You can probably already guess that I did. And it came at a time when I was feeling a wall looming up ahead of me. It was the perfect redirection. The wall vanished and I never hit another one.

The same thing happened when I was writing the manuscript I just turned in a couple weeks ago. I had written my characters into a boring corner (a dining room scene where the tryptophan was flowing freely). The wall in front of me threatened to put us all in a coma. I took my characters back a chapter or two, found something surprising to have one of them do and moved on. They never went back to the dining room. Wall averted.

Of course there is no 100% fool-proof solution to any writing challenge, but if you find yourself kicking against a writer’s block that has you flummoxed, try reversing your steps. Go back in time. You have the power to do it. Find the last place where a plot pivot held your interest. Now have your main character do something outrageously unpredictable and see where the new pivot takes you. Certainly, you may end up at a different wall, higher than the first, but you can always go back. That is your greatest tool as a novelist, the ability to bend time.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is pick up the sledgehammer. But it’s not the only thing. Hitting a wall may be a clue that you’ve wandered off plot and the wall is actually a wonderful nudge to allow you to retrace your steps and get back on target, or better yet, zero in on a new target that is better than the first.