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When you’re Stuck, Side-step: A Work-around for Writer’s Block
I am working on a novel, the fifth I’ve written. (One was my MFA novel, hidden in a drawer, one is published — link, two are with my agent being submitted.) It was going swimmingly and I was delighted. I had the big M going! (Big M=momentum, a priceless state when working on a long project.)
But then I got stuck. As I perused a book about writing romance, called Romancing the Beat , I realized I had a problem. To explain how I was stuck, I need to explain a bit about plotting for romance, in case you’re not familiar. In a romance, the main plot is the romance. Period. Boy meets girl, conflicts ensue, they break-up, but then they get back together again. HEA (happily ever after) ensues. This is what Gwen Hayes, the author of the book I read, calls the internal plot, and it is critical. You can’t have a romance without one.
But the best romances, the ones whose descriptions make you push the buy button or pull the book off the shelf and walk it to the counter, also have a compelling external plot, as Gwen Hayes calls it.
Things like:
The woman struggling to save the family farm for her father in a coma falls in love with the developer who wants to buy the land.
The struggling soap maker is hired by the fiancée of the man she accidentally…
