How to Use Your Notebook to Unstick Your Writing
A powerful two-step technique that works every time. (Plus, Mark Twain’s notebooks and marginalia.)
Every once in a while I get to a place in a story where it starts to feel kind of like a basketball circling the hoop. It just sort of goes around and around and doesn’t doanything. It adds words without pushing
Let’s call that the slow circle.
I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the slow circle so I can stop it before it bloats my manuscript. But lots of times when a student has a book that’s ballooned up to 100,000 or more words, I can almost guarantee that there are sections where they’ve written in circles trying to get the ball to either go in or go out. Doesn’t even matter which.
For me, the slow circle usually happens somewhere in the second act. I can hold all of Act I in my head. And I can hold all of Act III in my head. But Act II is half my book, and even though I use a plot board and I have ideas for how I’m going to get between Act I and Act II — it always changes. I never quite know what’s going to happen.
And sometimes that leads to the slow circle.
I actually have a two part trick for breaking out of it so my story can move forward. And it involves my everyday notebook.