{"id":310,"date":"2024-10-10T17:08:23","date_gmt":"2024-10-10T23:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/?p=310"},"modified":"2025-08-05T08:14:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T14:14:24","slug":"writers-block","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/writers-block\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer&#8217;s Block"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I created a chapter-by-chapter outline for another book; however, I&#8217;m stuck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What happened is the same thing that always happens: My characters take on lives of their own and make decisions in the moment that deviates so far from outline that it will bypass key events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;ve been stuck for a couple of weeks trying to create new scenarios that bring them back on track while going with the flow and feeling natural and not forced. I&#8217;ve concocted many so far, but they all require the characters to make choices that could seem bizarre, even stupid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are too many times in movies when I see a character make such a dumb choice that seems forced to continue the plot, e.g., if the nervous person doesn&#8217;t walk toward the creepy sound in the darkness then you can&#8217;t have a bloody murder scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While I could do something like that, I try not to force them to make such a stupid choice that the reader is wondering how they&#8217;ve lived so long without dying from what must be a lifetime of stupid decisions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I keep trying to create natural changes that will bring them back to the story. Otherwise, they&#8217;ll continue down a path that deviates too much that they&#8217;ll never reach the destination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s kind of like herding a large group of people, these characters take on minds of their own and do things I do not expect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I created a chapter-by-chapter outline for another book; however, I&#8217;m stuck. What happened is the same thing that always happens: My characters take on lives of their own and make decisions in the moment that deviates so far from outline that it will bypass key events. So I&#8217;ve been stuck for a couple of weeks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}