The topic for this month is: When you are stumped on moving a plot line forward, what do you do to reinvigorate your imagination?
I do lots of things, but most of them don't involve sitting at my computer and trying to summon creativity, like it's some ancient god that needs worshiping. Instead I go for a walk. Or I work on a crossword puzzle. Or I work on putting a few more rows on the afghan that I'm crocheting. Or I hop into my car and go for a drive. Or I take a shower.
See the thing with my muse is that if she knows I'm courting her, she's flighty. Instead, I have to appear to be doing something else, and thinking about things other than writing. Then the characters will start talking in my head to get my attention. Because they really do want their story to be told. So then I listen. I "watch" as they act out their parts, and they talk to each other.
In extreme situations, I've even stopped writing that story entirely. Then I'll have a dream. When I wrote my Mayan vampire stories, I started with two chapters. Then I got stumped. Nothing helped...until I had a dream a few weeks later. In it, a tall, white-haired and very pale man told me in a thick Russian accent, that the reason I was stumped was because I was giving the heroine the wrong hero. I had started with a Native American doctor. "No," he told me, "It has to be me." He smiled, showing me his vampire teeth. I told him I don't do vampires...too overdone. He told me that since the story involved the Mayan end of tonne, and the predictions of the end of time, that I needed to research the Mayans. When I woke up the next morning, I started to do just that. And what did I find? That every ceremony they had involved public blood-letting...especially by their nobles. Why all of the bleeding? Well, if their gods were vampires...the rest of the story wrote itself, along with a sequel that just flowed out of me.
Find out about what I'm currently working on, (another paranormal, from another dream--go figure!) by visiting my posting at my regular posting on the 16th of the month:
http://sweetnsexydivas.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-science-of-paranormal.html
And read about what other authors do when they have trouble moving their plots along by starting with the next author in the Round Robin:
Heather Haven http://heatherhavenstories.com/blog/