Nag Yourself Into Solving Story Problems — Off the Clock

When you’re in the middle of writing a story, quite often there’ll be a story problem in the back of your mind, nagging you. It’s not something you have to deal with right away, but it’s looming on the story’s horizon, and you know you’re going to have to figure out a solution to the problem soon, or come to a screeching halt on the manuscript, and be forced to figure it out before you can progress any further.

It could be a big problem or just a small one. Often there’s more than one, and they’ll come in a range of sizes. Even if you’re the most anal of plotters, there’s always one or two questions you’ve failed to anticipate on your way through the plotting process that have to get answered on your way through the manuscript.

While you’re writing the manuscript, the questions sit in your consciousness quite clearly, but writing time is so precious, it’s hard to stop putting words down to deal with a problem that could chew up who knows how many minutes of your time to resolve.

So don’t.

Use off-the-clock time to solve the problems instead.

If you’re like me, though, almost the minute you put the manuscript away, and real life takes over, all thoughts about the story tend to get rudely shoved out of your conscious thoughts by petty concerns like paying bills and turning up to work on time. So even the story questions are scattered and gone until the next time you fire up the manuscript.

Technology to the rescue. It doesn’t even have to be particularly advanced technology. Anything that you can set to give you a reminder sometime in the future is all you need – so even a voice-mail system will do the trick, if you’re a real technophobe. I use calendar appointments with pop-up reminders that softly ping me on my Blackberry. Most cellphones have that same basic function. You could also send yourself delayed email, set tasks with reminders, Tweet yourself…. I’m sure if you search around, there’s probably a reminder service or application somewhere.

Just before you shut down your manuscript, set up four or five (or more) reminders for yourself across the next 24 hours, or whatever feels appropriate for you until your next major writing session, if it’s closer than 24 hours. The timing of the reminders is up to you — you know what your day is like, and when your quiet times are — when you might best be able to think about your story, and the reminders will be most useful to you. The subject of the reminder is your story question (I’d keep it to just one for the day — you can ask a different question tomorrow).

Throughout the day your reminders will ping you, and nag you to think about your story question just when you have the opportunity and a few quiet moments to think about your story. If you have pen and paper to hand, you can scribble down ideas and notes, but you don’t have to. The act of thinking about the story is enough to get your mind working on the problem.

You might also try reminding yourself during busy moments when your mind isn’t actively engaged in the work and can mull over the story, instead.

In this way, you’re nagging yourself into solving the story problem “off the clock.” It’s also a great way to keep your mind in the story itself — you’ll find sliding back into the manuscript when you get to your next writing session a lot easier than usual.

If you do this type of nagging long enough, you’ll find that eventually you don’t need to nag yourself anymore — you’ll be automatically thinking of the story as soon as the world will let you. The nagging system is also a training device. But you’ll retrograde after a while, and find you’ll need the auto-nags to refresh the habit again.

First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009

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