The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [36]
Other than a limitless imagination, a fiction writer should possess self-discipline. Writing is great fun, but it's not all fun; if you can't steel yourself to plow through the un-fun parts, you'll never finish anything worth the writing. This quality includes both drive, and relentless self-correction—a continuous search for how to Do It Better, from whatever sources one can find.
We pause now for my "Writer's Block—Your Friend" spiel. There's something in my back-brain which puts on the brakes when I try to do the wrong thing in my book, put in something that the book isn't supposed to be, take a wrong turn. I just go blank. The words won't be forced. It takes a while to sort out if this is what's going on, or if it's just normal distractibility, but when I do get it correctly identified, the only thing to do is go back and revisualize the story itself. Noodling around on the sentence-revision level isn't the cure.
I've come to think theme is an emergent property of a book, and so it really isn't right to talk about a book's theme before the text is complete. But I think what's happening with this kind of block is that the wrong thing I was trying to do wouldn't have fit that complex emergent meaning that doesn't exist yet, but is trying to become. This sense of story, which I often can't even see or name at that point, is the invisible template against which I ultimately test each choice—of action, of viewpoint, whatever. When it finally fits, it all clicks in and I'm off and running again. This process is far more visceral than it is analytical.
Remember that scene from the movie Roger Rabbit, where Roger whips his hand out of the handcuff in which it has been stuck, and the human asks in outrage, "Could you always do that?" and Roger replies, "No! Only when it was funny!" It might seem, in something as apparently generic as an action-adventure novel, that almost any action would do. It doesn't. Only when it fits the theme. Then it's the right one. Then it's unstoppable.
And then there are the writer's blocks that come from simply not knowing what happens next. Some days the ideas flow, some days they have to be laboriously pieced together. Sometimes the attempt at piecing-together jostles the real answer loose. I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
In making up a new world, a writer has to be conscious of where language comes from, especially if trying to transport the reader into a different time and place than their everyday normal twenty-first century. (Pardon me while I walk around and admire that phrase. For most of my life, "the twenty-first century" was shorthand for "the future"; now I'm living in it. Time travel the hard way . . . shouldn't we spare a few more moments for marveling?) A writer needs to be a little bit conscious of the sources of words, too. I found in writing books in the Chalion and Sharing Knife series particularly, where the setting is, while not historical, at any rate preindustrial, I had to be constantly watching my vocabulary for anachronisms. I couldn't refer to objects that wouldn't have been invented in those worlds; all my metaphors had to be checked to make sure that they would work in this new context. I puzzled a bit over borderline words like "sanguine" and "choleric," which have their roots in an obsolete theory of physiology that never existed in Chalion, but have since acquired general meanings; I decided to leave them in lest I be stripped of vocabulary altogether.
The inverse