If you can’t go further with your story, don’t just keep pushing. Beating your head against a wall will only give you bruises, and brick dust on the floor. Take a step back, or two steps, or three. Maybe then you’ll see that, off to the side, there’s a door. You can go through it, and now you can move on.

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When I was younger, I could work on my writing at least six hours a day, frequently eight, sometimes ten, and once or twice as much as twelve. As I get older, my physical and creative energy diminishes. Now, if I can work four hours, I’ve done well.

It doesn’t take that much physical strength to write, so much as endurance. But when my handwriting becomes illegible, or typos pile up on the screen, I know that I am getting tired, and I should take a break. I find something useful to do around the house, or read a few postings of on-line comics, or play a round of Spaceward Ho! on my iPad, or read a few pages of the two or three or four books beside my chair. My breaks usually take no more than about twenty minutes. As soon as I am relaxed and able to think and see clearly again, I go back to work. I’ve caught my breath, and now I can go on.

Sometimes it’s not easy for me to stop pushing beyond the limits of my strength and creativity, especially if I’m not aware that I’m doing that. One more sentence that leads to another, then another paragraph, then another, until finally I can no longer see the setting, hear the dialogue, distinguish one character from another, or have any idea of what happens next. I’m not just tired, I have taken a wrong turn, hit a wall, and I have to stop. 

If I’m lucky, I may recognize the wrong turn later in the day, or the next morning just before I wake up, or just as I walk out of the house. Then I can go back to the story, delete that wrong turn and everything that follows it, and go the way that I should have gone before. Everything works now.

But if I’m not lucky, I can go no further. Not because I don’t want to — wanting to is why I kept on pushing — but literally because I can’t. The pen doesn’t move, my fingers won’t type. I have to back off for a while. Sometimes I don’t discover the wrong turning until days, or months, or years later.

I forced myself to write two sequels of a proto-Black Ring, even though it hurt to do so. When I tried to read it some years later, I discovered that it was garbage, and I threw it all away. Some people say that a writer should never throw anything away, that it might be useful later, but after a while garbage starts to smell, and draws flies. 

I forced myself to write sixty thousand words past where my character did something against his nature. It took me six years to realize where I had gone wrong. This time I let him do what he knew he should do, and followed him off into a fantastic adventure which became The Gift. 

I tried to plot out a series of stories inspired by my Elf Quest work, but in a galaxy so far away that George Lucas never heard of it. I forgot what the nature of that inspiration was, and it took me almost thirty years to remember, that my Elf Quest stories were about normal people, in their own world, dealing with a situation that was normal, but which they had never experienced. 

I threw the heroic adventures and dramatic enemies and implausible obstacles away. I laid out a rough and largely disposable structure, in which my far future stories could grow.  I’m working on it now, and I’m letting the stories, the scenes within those stories, the characters and settings and story objectives, just come to me, instead of trying to force them. It works now, and I get chills. 

Forcing in any way has never worked for me. Planet Masters came to me as an inspiration of the whole story, needing only some extra background and settings. Pursuit of Diana was in my head after watching both mini-series of V several times back to back. Book Two of The Black Ring came to me when I knew that the beginning had to follow directly from the ending of Book One, and that informed me about how it had to end.

I have learned, though I sometimes forget, to trust my muse for creation. I have learned to save my thinking about a story for revising and correcting and polishing. I have to remember, that there may be a door just to the side of whatever wall is blocking me. And when I do, then I can go through it, and I can go on.