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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What Gives You Writing Hives?

I've never suffered from actual red, splotchy hives. I had a roommate who got hives when she was too cold, and a friend who got hives when she was flustered/embarrassed.

But I've gotten a case of emotional hives when it came to trying to plot a story.

NO LIE.

Since so many writers I respected recommended reading books like Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, and Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, I bought them all, including a few others, like Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, Outlining Your Novel by K.M Weiland, and The Story Template by Amy Deardon.

Each of these books broke me out in emotional hives.

Literally stifled all creativity within my little pantster soul. The keyboard was eternally dry, save for blog posts, which must go on. [It should be noted that all of the above books are very well written. I had no beef with style, just content.]

What makes me even more aggravated with myself is that I'd taken a workshop at a conference on the beauties of being created to write as a pantster (see notes from the workshop here) and yet I still felt I needed to try to break this mold I'd been created in.

Well, I haven't thrown the books away, though I did lend them out to a friend getting started with the writing process.

But I've let this baggage GO.

As a result, I'm about 2/3 (just shy of 60k) of the way done with my current WIP, and the words are flowing from my fingers onto the page. It's SO freeing and amazing to write how I was engineered to write!

Let's Analyze

What gives you emotional writing hives (or actual ones, if you're willing to cop to it)?