Mental Can Openers & Writer's Hash: The Writing Struggle or Don’t Count Your Chickens...

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of owning a few chickens.  I love farm-fresh eggs.  I’d have to build a coop of course.  I can just imagine how flap doors, ramps, pull-out cleaning features...etc., will look.  I see a barn red coop; happy, safe chickens pecking behind coop wire.  Eggs pop out from everywhere with deep golden yolks.  I’m a hit with friends and neighbors giving them away.  Cleaning is always on a sunny, warm day and done in 10 minutes.  (Do I hear laughter?)

 We all know plans can, and do, go wrong.  Building materials are imperfect.  Actual construction requires pounding in lots of nails, cutting wood straight, sanding, gluing, caulking,...   Sawing and pounding nails get repetitive and tiring, then mistakes happen. Wood splits.  Splinters happen (a new bumper sticker?)

Chickens can be loud, uncooperative, dirty.  Disease and predators threaten.  Cleaning the coop and collecting eggs in all weather becomes a drudge.

The above applies to writing a story.  For me, starts are fun.  Great ideas!  Story plotting where the day is saved as time is nicked, cliffs are appropriately hung, love is found, evil is thwarted with a thwack.  I envision excited readers blotting a tender tear, laughing til they snort, excitedly waving others over to read brilliant prose.  Money and offers will roll in like colored eggs on Easter.

Then I start to write it, scene by stubborn scene.  That portion is too short, another too long.  A chapter out of place?  Dull narrative.  Constant sentence length.  Repetitious words pounding like nails.  Or is that my head?  Bright “barn-red” dialogue reads like “grey.” 

Characters run loose; panicked squawking chickens.  Others won’t move at all, and no one’s laying ‘yoked presents’ except the author.  Re-reading, and editing begins to feel like endlessly cleaning the coop of you-know-what.  And rewritten scenes smell like you-know-what. 

It’s been months without a golden yoke.  I’m still gumming cream-o-mush every morning and chasing off weasels of discouragement at night.  Darn, statin-frattin, story-chickens!  Worse, there’s no time clock.  No boss pecking away at me, saying, “Get it done by Friday or else.”  TV beckons.

How is a writer to resolve this?  How do we find Godly motivation?  Where do we find the gentle nudge to continue?

My way to get through this is to take it personally.  Get cranked and repeat...  “I love eggs.  I want eggs.  And I’ll have eggs – even if I have to strangle it out of those stupid, feathered clucks.  My forefathers didn’t struggle up the food chain, plowing the land under a hot sun, so their current progeny, (i.e. me) could be defeated by a flock of flightless fugitives from Chick-fil-a!  NO CHICKEN, NO COOP, IS GOING TO GET THE BEST OF ME!!

Those chapters will line up and salute.  Narrative will be spit-shined and dialogue will sparkle like marine boots on inspection.  Action will be crisp and tension sharp or Character’s heads will roll!  Now, authors fall in at your computers.  (I just love it when the testosterone shots kick in, during a John Wayne movie weekend.)  Sit.  Now write!

How do you stay motivated?

MORE OF BRAD'S BLURB: The Dragon’s Mist Chronicles: The Last Ride in the Moonlight

So how does a boy of fourteen find the female blacksmith, who's half ogre, a willing husband?  Sure, Riddley might acquire a new suit of clothes for a traveling leprechaun who carries his home in a geode, but how does he get the bully-sheriff to pay his tailoring bill?  Or acquire magical wood from a holy tree that’s choking?  Lastly, the fairy queen wants a royal symbol the nasty gremlins can’t copy, and the only male banshee alive needs the tower bell mended.  It seems female banshee’s screaming at him cracked it, and he’s being blamed.