As a person who works on fixing up her home (ceaselessly, my family would tell you), I have a penchant for HGTV and other do-it-yourself venues (read PBS and YouTube). Like any other normal television viewer, I generously share my viewpoints with the doers and makers and homeowners on TV.
“What do you mean the room has turned into the children’s playground?” is my response to someone whining on the show. “Organize it! Change it. You can fix that problem yourself.”
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“You think your room is blah? Buy some paint and a drop cloth and paint it. Get some cool new furniture—or visit an estate sale and buy some cool old furniture! How hard is that?”
Okay, I would never dare say that to their faces—at least not that way. And I know that there are design-challenged people who really don’t know how to fix their decor issues. Some are overwhelmed; some are unable to get their partners on board. I get that. Besides, if people didn’t have these problems, there wouldn’t be a show for me to learn from.
I admit to being an impatient, never-give-up, fix-it kind of person. If there is something wrong, I try to find a way to fix it. Or help someone else fix it .
For a lot of people the problem is not knowing where to begin or how to approach “the fix”. They see so many things wrong and the things have so many moving parts that they are paralyzed with not knowing where to begin. Yet the answer can be simple. Change the rhythm. Change it up.
“Change the rhythm. Change it up.”
To the frazzled, frustrated homeowner, I would suggest: Think of up to three changes you can make, as small or as radical as you wish. Then make them. As soon as you can. It may be a furniture rearrangement and new curtains in a bold color you’ve never used before. It may be freshening the paint on the trim, possibly with a color change. You could add some new outsized, dramatic vase(s) to a corner of the floor. Three simple things to try and see if you like the effect.
To get really crazy, purposely choose arrangements and colors and styles you’ve never used before. Promise to try it for a few weeks. If you don’t like it, you can change it again or put it back the way it was. Chances are you’ll still leave something a little different. Testing it out unchains you from what you have been used to seeing. When you see one you like, you’ll want to keep it.
However, you have to initiate the changes you want. As much as I heckle them, the people on the HGTV shows actually have made the first step. They contacted HGTV, changing the rhythm of how they dealt with the problem.
Changing things up is not an unfamiliar notion. People frequently suggest changing things up when they have become mundane or boring or predictable. You have to make a conscious effort to make it happen.
Writers are up against the same thing. We know it as writer’s block. You may or may not believe writer’s block is real, but there certainly are those situations where a writer doesn’t know what to do next. It may happen in a first draft over how to write the next scene or chapter, or it may be in revising a thorny problem in a scene the writer thinks can’t be written any other way.
My response is still “Change the rhythm.”
In the Environment
If you are used to writing in a quiet library or office, take your writing tools and set yourself up in a noisy, busy place, say at a kitchen table or even, yes, in the living room with the blaring TV and quibbling teenagers—anywhere different and lively, so long as you can keep your brain on-task.
Combating the background noise can actually help you focus on how to solve your story’s problem. It can also inspire you with ways to liven up a scene.
Have your protagonist uncharacteristically pick a quarrel with another character. Even if you didn’t think they had anything to quarrel about. Perhaps they did and you didn’t realize it, so you were stuck. That will come out in the writing and could even result in a secondary plot line.
Because you’re in new surroundings you might also discover there’s another character you could add to the scene that will liven things up or add to your plot.
In the Writing
In some cases, my advice is literal. Change the rhythm of the actual writing. If you’ve been pacing your writing in a certain style, it may run the risk of boring the reader. If you’re stuck, chances are it is already boring you. So change the rhythm. Speed up the pace. Throw in some action. Or slow it down with a reflective internal monologue. Interrupt your plot line with a new character, or remove one precipitously.
Make a change in your characters’ relationships. A secondary character could resolve an issue with someone with whom they’ve had a long-term disagreeable history. They could end up combining forces. Or something else new may arise from their burying the hatchet.
In the Method
If you are revising and can’t solve the problem all your beta readers and colleagues have identified, try reading the passage aloud, or even backwards. Focusing on the words that way can let you see them in a new light, helping to clarify the problem. It may be enough to help you find the solution. Perhaps—heartbreak alert—you’ll have to ax that scene altogether and write a newer, stronger one. Go ahead and do it!
Stop being afraid to make the changes real. Write them, type them, print them. The ability to keep multiple files of our drafts allows us to make changes without losing our starting point. Create the words and read them. They don’t work? Toss them! Much like rearranging the furniture, we can put the words back in original form or create new passages. Changes are not set in stone until you carve them.
Our subconscious is powerful. The time you’ve lost stewing over this issue—whatever it is—has actually been time your brain has been working on an answer. Changing the rhythm of how you work provides the chance for you to see what it has done.
