So let's talk about trying to start writing again after a long break. This is where I'm at right now and it seems like a topic worth blogging about.

A little background. In June 2011, I was told my day job was being relocated from Minneapolis to Atlanta--1100 miles away. I opted to take the relocation. I'd agreed to write a story for Crave the Night shortly before the work announcement, so I wrote and wrote until September. After that came edits, which is writing, but not really--if that makes sense.

For me, revision of words already written is much different than writing new words/new scenes. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's more sharpening the blade then rather than creating the knife. If that makes sense.

My move to Atlanta happened in January and by the time things settled down and I tried to start writing again, it was March. And then I went back to Minnesota in April and spent three weeks working on my house to get it ready to sell. That meant I lost the small (very small) bit of momentum I was building to start writing again, and right now, it's simply torturous to try.

It's always tough to start writing again after time off. This is one of the reasons why I've only taken a very brief periods off between books, but there was nothing I could do about the move.

Now the question becomes how do I restart?

The obvious answer (for me at least) is writing and writing until it starts coming back to me. I've been trying this, but the words I get, no matter how hard-fought they are, have to be cut. Everything that's coming out is just plain bad right now. Which makes it hard to keep writing because I get so discouraged. How can it be this difficult?

I've been burnt out before. I've dealt with a total creative numbness during that period, but this is nothing like that. This time the characters are there. The general stories are there. I can even see and hear the scenes in my head, but when it comes to putting them down in pixels, it's like they're blown away and I have no words. None.

I tell myself just to write anything, to not worry about setups or transitions. The important thing is simply to find words again and get them down. It's easier said than done.

I'm thinking I might try writing only dialogue since I still hear conversations...when I'm away from my computer and there's no chance of my getting them down. That's the only idea I have right now to try to bust through this wall. If you have any suggestions, please share them. I need all the help I can get.

Photo courtesy of Alan Moore

Monday morning I looked at pictures that had been taken of the solar eclipse. Unfortunately, it wasn't visible in Atlanta, so I couldn't see it firsthand. The images were incredible, and as I was looking at them, I remembered that ancient peoples were terrified of eclipses, that they feared the sun wouldn't reappear.

I tried to cast my mind into that place, back to a time when scientific knowledge didn't exist and superstition ran wild.

I remembered that show I'd seen a while back on why humans have an ingrained fear of the dark and that our modern world with its electricity isn't as dark as it was back in that day. There's a darkness scale and very few places anywhere on Earth register at a 1 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale. Cities like New York measure so high on the scale that a person would need to be on a boat and sail out far enough for the Earth's curvature to hide the glow.

So imagine a world without electric light, a time when humans had just begun to form agricultural societies and give up hunting and gathering. And imagine the sun appearing to be "eaten" by this dark shadow.

For one, brief moment I was able to imagine this terror.

But only for an instant. I am a product of an age where science is advanced, a time when we know the sun will reappear shortly, and that while this is an event of note (eclipses don't happen every day), it's natural and something that happens at regular intervals.

I think this is part of being a writer. Being able to imagine how someone else might feel (someone from a world so completely different than my own) is what it takes to write stories and characters. I'm never going to be a magical troubleshooter and it's unlikely I'll ever meet a demon, but that doesn't mean I can't tell stories about people who have these different realities.

If you have a few minutes, try to send your mind back in time and imagine the fear people felt. I think it's a good exercise.

Over on Pinterest, a couple of people have posted a picture with a list of words a writer can use other than said. I'm assuming it came from some blog, but I haven't clicked through to check, but it leaves me wondering why any writer would pin this.

There's a couple of reasons why I feel this way. For one, some of the suggestions are just plain bad. For example instead of he said, according to this you could write he laughed. Um, what? People don't talk while they're laughing. Are seriously thinking this is a good construction? "Jane," he laughed, "you...hahaha...crack...haha...me...haha...up." No. Just no.

The other reason I'm not enamored with this pin is the word said disappears for the vast majority of readers. Most will barely know they saw it, but that doesn't happen with other words, especially the more memorable.

In fact, I spent time taking these substitutes for said out of my earlier work before I republished them in ebook format. If a character is constantly speaking in a hiss, I can only wonder if they're part snake. :-) In my defense, I didn't have hiss originally--that got added in edits--but I didn't take them out again when I went through the story before it was printed. The buck stopped with me, so my responsibility. But I had a chance to change it and that's what I did. If you see hissed in the story now, it's because I made the conscious decision to keep it there for a specific reason.

My advice is to use anything other than said or asked sparingly. The last thing I want is to jar anyone out of my story and unusual dialogue tags can do just that. There's a difference between using an "invisible" word and repetition.