Here are five of my personal tips for beating the back-to-bed blues.
When all I want to do is see what the Netflix fairy delivered to my doorstep or Google everyone I’ve ever met instead of writing, here’s what I do:
1. When you end your writing for the day, leave off in mid-sentence. That way, when you start work the next day, you know where to begin. If I end my day with “Sarah didn’t want to wake her father but she had to because …” when the next day rolls around, I’m not faced with that what-do-I-do-next dread.
2. Feel free to leave blanks. I get hung up on names or places or logistics and this keeps me from a productive day of writing. So if I hit a stumbling block, I leave a big blank. For example, once I couldn’t think of what a character was named, so I wrote:
“She turned to look and saw it was the guy from the boat, ‘Hey, I’m [insert name of cocky, attractive boy here].’
No aimless pondering over who or what, just a note to myself to go back later. Same thing goes for logistical matters:
“Jenna hadn’t always been like this, but the summer after sophomore year, she’d [insert bad thing that happened to Jenna] and since then she’d been worried, anxious, picked at her cuticles, furrowed her brow.”
3. This isn’t your only chance. Remember that. You’ll have time to correct, edit, trim, add on, swap, and improve later. For now, just get on with it.
4. Make the end the beginning. If I’m stuck, I sometimes rearrange the timeline of things. I put the ending in front of me and ask, “What if this is where the story started?”
5. Make lists of scenes you know will happen and dialogue lines you want to have occur, and when you’re stuck for what comes next, just write one of the scenes. Novels are not giant hunks of cheese, they are scenes that connect and pull you from one to the next. So, if you write one of the scenes, chances are it will lead to another one. Besides, it’s always easier to say, “Today I have to write a scene in which Love confronts her father,” than it is to say, “Today I gotta finish this book.”
Just write a scene.
And then another.
Emily Franklin is the author of over a dozen books for young adults including seven-book series The Principles of Love and The Other Half of Me, as well as her latest book At Face Value, a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac set at high school. She also writes books for adults including Too Many Cooks: 4 Kids, 1 Mother, 165 New Foods - A Memoir of Tasting, Testing, and Discovery in the Kitchen which will be published in April 2009. Visit her at www.emilyfranklin.com.
