Using transpositions to help your writing move forward

What do you do when you run into a block? When I am stuck (and it feels like there have been a lot of those moments lately), there’s a great temptation to just not write for a while. To walk away and do something else. Sometimes that does help. A change of scene, a walk in the fresh air, a practical, physical activity – cleaning perhaps – can help clear my head. But it may become a sort of procrastination. One displacement activity leads to another and I feel I’m losing my routine.

What to do? The exercise that I come back to I call transposition. (I’m not sure if that’s the right word. There may be one that’s more kosher. Tell me if you know it!) But names aside, here are two variations on the theme that I’ve used to keep up the discipline of writing when I feel at a loss to go on.

Transposition 1 (for a Work in Progress – WiP)

When you find yourself stuck on a scene, one way to move forward is to re-write it from a different perspective or in a different style.

Take the scene – a scene with your hero acting heroic, perhaps – that doesn’t quite ring true. Re-write it from the perspective of your hero’s antagonist. How do they interpret what is happening? Or re-write it from the perspective of a minor character who just happens to see a part of what is going on. What’s their spin on it?

Perhaps the minor character is a child on his way to school. How will he retell the story to his friends in the school playground? Perhaps the minor character is an adult who reports the incident to the police. Write her testimony in the form of a police report.

I recently found myself doing this for my current novel. Quite early, my protagonist, Luce, has important information she must convey to a secondary character, the Provost. Originally I wrote the scene from her point of view, but it was boring. Then I wrote it from the Provost’s point of view and it was better. Finally I wrote it from the point of view of the Provost’s housekeeper and discovered the housekeeper does not like Luce one bit. (And Luce is such a nice person!) I also discovered a lot more about the housekeeper’s private relationship with the Provost. In the draft of my novel at present, this scene is once again from the Provost’s point of view, but the exercise gave me a new way of seeing it. And also some material I can use later in the story.

Making this transposition can help you see what is holding you back in the scene. It may show you a character you need to bulk up. It may give you an idea of something your hero can say or do that is different from what you first imagined. It may encourage you to scrap the scene altogether and write something completely different.

Transposition 2 (when you don’t have a WiP)

Another scenario in which transposition can help is when you are stuck for something to write at all. You don’t have a current work in progress (and perhaps fear you never will again). Or perhaps you want to get completely away from your epic, to take a break, but still keep your writing discipline.

In this situation, you might transpose the story of a film or TV episode you’ve seen recently, or even the story of a novel. Take something that you found irritating for whatever reason, and re-write it closer to your heart’s desire. Swap out the characters, or swap them around. Change the scenes. Change the focus or the theme. End the story more appropriately. Or you could transpose it into a different genre entirely, or mash genres together.

The least that can happen is that you keep up your writing. The best might be a whole new story that exites you to begin writing again.

The most memorable time I used this exercise, I was really irritated by a thriller I had seen on TV the night before. The film was set on a reservation in the USA. A crime had been committed and an FBI agent (a young woman) had been designated to investigate. She was helped by a man with local knowledge, a tracker and hunter. The tracker, it turned out, was the real hero and the story ended in a standard shoot-out.

The story was trying to conform to the genre at the same time as it challenged some genre stereotypes. (For example, the FBI agent was a woman, the all-American tracker was married with a native American woman and had mixed-race children.) In my rewrite it was the tracker’s native American wife who worked with the FBI agent to discover the truth while the tracker took a back seat and looked after their kids. My story ended in arrests rather than a hail of bullets. Less commercial perhaps, but I found it a great deal more satisfactory.

Write against the clock

Don’t let these transposition exercises run away with you. (Unless, of course, you find a new idea so rich it is worth more time to develop.) Mostly, you’ll set yourself a time limit: an hour, a morning. Write against the clock. See what you come up with!

Image credits

Lens by Jonas Svidras from Pixabay
Transition/Transformation/Education (graphic of two figures walking away form one another) by d4rkwzd from Pixabay.
Paris Museum Orsay clock women by valentinsimon0 from Pixabay

Used, with thanks, under Creative Commons licenses.

Other links

Coping with a writing block is a topic we often come back to on Pens Around the World. Other posts that suggest alternative solutions:
Gail’s Walking and Writing
Michael’s Ask your resident robot what to write?
Nigel’s When the end is the beginning