I knew it would happen sooner or later...that I would run out of story ideas or energy to develop new ones, or both. My understanding is that it's not a permanent condition, but it is a startling one, nonetheless. My laptop was open and my five published novels sat proudly on the coffee table in front of me, but nothing, absolutely nothing spilled out on the screen in front of me, no matter how long I sat there.
"I can't think of anything to write about," I complained to my husband. "I just can't seem to come up with any new ideas."
"Write about car picnics," he said.
"About what?" I asked.
"About our car picnics," he repeated. "All the beautiful Cape places we go and all the great stuff we see out there."
First, for those of you non-Cape Codders, I should explain what a car picnic is. When one lives on the Cape, one is always surrounded by natural beauty, and no matter what the weather, it is therefore impossible to stay inside. We are the population for whom a raging Nor'easter is just another day at the beach (or at the very least, a command performance one has no choice but to attend).
But much of the weather on this defiant sandbar can be mighty inhospitable, especially in the winter...just ask any Pilgrim. They left for Plymouth as soon as possible. Thus, the resolution to the conflict between wanting to be being outside, and dealing with angry wind, cold rain, and other vicissitudes of coastal living, is to pack a lunch, drive to a pretty spot, and eat it in the car; aka, car picnic. Binoculars are another necessity, by the way, preferably waterproof ones.
Try as I might, however, I could not create an entire novel, much less a short story, about a car picnic. A brief poem was the best I could do and even that wasn't very good. It's not that I haven't written anything at all recently, it's just that every time I plunge into something, it stalls. In fact, I have a folder full of stories labelled "Need Work" that I haven't looked at in several months. I also have five novels in various stages of completion ...scratch that...more like various stages of despair.
The first one is called Reunion and I've actually written about 100 pages of that one, detailing the past and present expectations, dreams, and realities of four friends about to attend their 50th high school reunion (this, in itself, should frighten at least three of you). The reunion is still a month away in the story line, and all of a sudden, I don't really care what happens to any of them or how they feel about it.
Another one of my unfinished novels has more hope, at least in terms of setting. It takes place in Tuscany and the characters are modeled after my grandchildren, as I imagine they will be when they grow up. I even learned how to use Google Translator in order to insert relevant Italian phrases into the narrative. The problem here is, that I started writing it seven or eight years ago, and my grandchildren have insisted on growing up in the meantime and are gradually negating my initial impressions of their future selves. It's also supposed to be a love story, and in the entire 200 completed pages, I have yet to get any of the characters to cooperate in terms of falling for another.
Then there was my recent decision to write a historical novel. In the last two months I've written all of 20 pages of that one, largely because the era I chose as a backdrop, the one I "knew so much about it," is a much larger factual mystery to me than I originally envisioned. Somehow the hours of research I have already committed to the project don't seem to be materializing into anything that resembles a creative format.
So, I went back to Hemingway's mantra to write about what I know. This resulted in some initial chapters of two novels that take place on Cape Cod. In the first, I created a Portuguese family starting an ice cream business in Chatham; this was before I read that the ethnicity population ratio in Chatham is 97% Caucasian, so I moved them to Provincetown. Then I read Patry Francis's The Orphans of Race Point and discovered that no matter how much research I did, I would never master the cultural distinctions (much less the language) of this proud population.
I also read Kristen Hannah's 400 page masterpiece, The Great Alone. This immediately humbled any ambitions I had in the second of these Cape novels to rely on the wild beauty of where I live in order to hold together a shaky plot line, and the dubious set of characters I chose to illustrate via this setting.
The good news is, as my co-conspirators in this dubious profession of authorship have, as previously noted, all assured me, writer's block is not a permanent condition; that sooner or later a sudden burst of inspiration will arrive, and I will wipe the dust off my laptop and plunge in once again. Maybe I will even write about car picnics...or maybe I'll just start a blog.
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