by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1
We are into Day 4 of 2022, and I’m looking for a better year this time around. But then, I was like everyone else this time last year, hoping 2021 would be better than 2020. And it wasn’t.
In fact, 2021 was much worse for me than 2020, so I’m going into this year with NO expectations. I don’t know about you, but writing in a pandemic is hard, especially when said pandemic affects my family. It is very hard to keep focused on anything, including writing. Therefore, (and you know what the therefore is there for) I’m going to talk about one thing that helped me last year when I had a deadline, and I couldn’t stay focused on my story.
For me, it was the Girls in the Attic. James Scott Bell calls his the Boys in the Basement. Personally, I like Girls in the Attic better. When I couldn’t write or had a problem with the story that I couldn’t figure out, I would hand the matter over to them (and to God). Come morning during that magical time between rousing from the world of sleep to being fully awake, the solution to the problem would come to me. Sometimes I wanted to slap my forehead and say, “Of course. Why didn’t I see that earlier?”
If you haven’t figured it out, the girls (for me) and boys (for JSB) is your subconscious. I actually stumbled onto the girls quite by accident. When I wrote my first book there were times that the plot simply wouldn’t come together. One night I carried the problem to bed with me, thinking about it until I fell asleep.
When I’m on deadline, I set my clock for 5:30 a.m. so that I have time to work on my book before life and a hundred emails hit me. I always start to wake up about fifteen minutes before the alarm sounds, and that morning the answer to the problem popped into my head.
After that, I made a point of thinking about my story just before going to sleep. Often I’ll get a wickedly wonderful twist to my plot the next morning. Or a character trait I hadn’t noticed but is exactly what my character needs.
Are there times other than falling awake (if you can fall asleep, then I assume you can fall awake) that an author can take advantage of the subconscious? Absolutely! Doing mundane chores like washing dishes or dusting or ironing—does anyone iron any more?—or walking. More than once when I have a problem with my story, I’ll hit the neighborhood streets and walk until the solution comes to me.
And some of my best ideas come when I’m either in the shower or driving. I’ve thought about getting one of those pens that write upside down, but I take such short showers I can usually capture what comes to me there. But driving—I use my phone’s recording app to record the ideas I get on trips. There’s even voice-to-text apps that will take what you speak into your phone and translate it to sentences. I’ll use that one more often if they ever create an app that understands my Southern drawl.
So, when you’re struggling to get words on the page, let your mind wander. You might be surprised with the problems you can solve when you quit trying to be in charge.
Here’s to 2022 being the year we all hope it will be. But even more, remember that you’re not in charge—God is.
Crosshairs (Natchez Trace Park Rangers Book #3)
Investigative Services Branch (ISB) ranger Ainsley Beaumont arrives in her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to investigate the murder of a three-month-pregnant teenager. While she wishes the visit was under better circumstances, she never imagined that she would become the killer’s next target–nor that she’d have to work alongside an old flame.
After he almost killed a child, former FBI sniper Lincoln Steele couldn’t bring himself to fire a gun, which had deadly and unforeseen consequences for his best friend. Crushed beneath a load of guilt, Linc is working at Melrose Estate as an interpretive ranger. But as danger closes in on Ainsley during her murder investigation, Linc will have to find the courage to protect her. The only question is, will it be too little, too late?
Award-winning author Patricia Bradley continues her Natchez Trace Park Rangers series with a story about how good must prevail when evil just won’t quit.
Patricia Bradley is a Carol finalist and winner of an Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award in Suspense, and three anthologies that included her stories debuted on the USA Today Best Seller List. She and her two cats call Northeast Mississippi home–the South is also where she sets most of her books. Her romantic suspense novels include the Logan Point series and the Memphis Cold Case Novels. Obsession, the second book in the Natchez Trace Park Rangers series, released Februrary 2, 2021. She is now hard at work on the third book, Crosshairs.
Writing workshops include American Christian Fiction Writers online courses, workshops at the Mid-South Christian Writer’s Conference, the KenTen Retreat where she was also the keynote, Memphis American Christian Fiction Writer group, and the Bartlett Christian Writers group. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.