Guest Post: Morgan Huneke

Yesterday my friend Morgan Huneke released The Crossways, the second book in her Time Captives series. Check it out on Amazon; it'd make a good Christmas/birthday present. If you haven't already, go ahead and buy Creighton Hill, the first book in the trilogy.

To celebrate The Crossways' release, Morgan is hosting a blog party. Go to her blog to get the full list of who is doing what when (see the link above for her blog address). For my first post, Morgan shared some tips on defeating writer's block.

Time Captives Writer’s Block

I’m not really one of those people who insist there’s no such thing as writer’s block. I may have rarely experienced true writer’s block, but I’d say I had my share with Time Captives. I’ve said many times before that this was a hard story to write. Very hard. As much as I wanted to give up, I pushed to keep going. Here are some of the things I did to help.

Go for a bike ride. 

Whenever I’m stuck, it really helps to get some fresh air and exercise. It’s also when I do my best brainstorming. I’ve gotten some great ideas that way. I struggled with how to split up the story into multiple books for quite a while. I couldn’t get the structure to work properly in two books, but it was too much for one. While I was riding, I had the idea of splitting it into a trilogy called Time Captives. It was also while riding that I realized the solution to the low stakes the Time Captives were facing.

Introduce a new character. 

The Time Captives were giving me no end of trouble, so I introduced a new character who was on a completely different side of the story. Turns out, he was exactly what I needed to move the plot forward. It gave me time away from the part that wasn’t working while still working on the project.

Rewrite the story from a different point of view. 

Sometimes I would get stuck because I was using the wrong character’s point of view. Change it to the right one, and it would be perfect.

Have a family member read it and give me ideas. 

My youngest sister always reads my writing as soon as I write it, so she sometimes gave me ideas without being asked. But other times I had to ask my mom to read a section and tell me how to solve my problem.

Have group brainstorming sessions. 

This kind of goes along with the last one, only not necessarily requiring reading. Many, many times, family conversations centered around Time Captives as my family came up with random ideas to fix the issues in the story, some good, some, well, not so great. Like when they all lobbied for me to maim Joey. Nope, not gonna happen.

I got stuck a lot when writing Time Captives, but these methods helped me to push through to the end. If you’re a writer, do you have any other tips for beating writer’s block?

Thanks, Morgan! I know I'll be using these for the story I'm thinking of writing. I'll share more about that at a later date,

I'm doing 2 more posts for the blog party this week; the next one will be Thursday, and I'll be interviewing Eleanor, one of the Time Captives. See you then!

Katelyn