Earlier this week my protagonist stopped talking to me. It’s
not as mad as it sounds – I promise – but there really is no other way to describe
what happened. I was working on a chapter, or rather a section of a chapter,
which saw my protagonist interact via a series of text messages with another
character – and it just wasn’t working. I pushed and shoved and wrote and
rewrote. It
could have been writer’s block – whatever that means, if such a thing even
exists – but something about this felt personal.
I looked to my protagonist for an answer and found her
faced away from me, arms folded, foot tapping on the floor as if to say, ‘Well
if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.’
So I did the only logical thing that I could think of. I
packed up my protagonist, took her into town, and we had a catch up over a cup
of tea.
I’m not really helping the ‘It’s not as mad as it sounds’
argument there, am I? Hear me out, though...
When I wrote the first draft of my PhD book, I spent the majority
of my writing time in coffee shops – because I’m a beautiful cliché like that.
The whole thing was handwritten – pause for horrified gasps – and because of
that I could be fairly flexible about where I got my writing done on a day to
day basis. I occasionally moved coffee shops but typically migrated back
towards one in particular where the staff would say, ‘Working today?’ on seeing
me and, following my affirmative answer, they would then throw two tea bags
into my teapot rather than just the one. There is a special place in heaven for
these people, of that much I’m sure.
So Gillian and I, in the early days, spent a lot of time
talking and writing over tea. And it turns out that on a grubby Monday morning
when we were both equally tired of staring at the same mind-map-marked four
walls, we both needed a change of place.
I had obviously done something to annoy her because while
we’ve had our battles over the last eighteen months, I can’t recall a time when
she flat out refused to have a conversation with me – not a conversation, as
such, but you know what I mean. It turns out, though, that the Gillian bit of
my brain is about as particular as the superstitious writer part of my brain –
who would have thought it? – and that after weeks upon weeks of ripping her
apart and piecing her story back together in a different order, with new chunks
unashamedly wedged in around her fictional life, the old girl was feeling a bit
battered – and I think I probably was as well. So we went for tea at a quiet
coffee shop in town, and we took a pen and a notebook, and we talked it out.
It was an entirely new chapter that I was working on but
between tea, talking, and a little more wandering around than I had allowed
myself to do on previous writing days, Gillian and I got a full draft of that
chapter penned over the course of Monday. And for the first time I came to
appreciate that protagonists, much like the writers who create them, are well
within their rights to be delicate little flowers in need of some love on
occasion as well.
So whether you want to call it writer’s block or something
else altogether, my stellar piece of advice – until I do this again and it
doesn’t work – is to take your protagonist for tea. You’re a good couple and
you can work it out, you might just need to say a few home truths to each other
first...
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