Helping break my writer's block and lack of motivation to write

I have often found that if I try to write when I am not really in the right frame of mind, it simply does not come together, whereas the words seem to flow effortlessly at other times, when scene-related energy levels are high.

I have never understood why this is the case and can only assume that, like just about everything else in life, it is cyclic. I think Jacqueline2 may have hit the nail on the head with her use of the 'battery' analogy. It seems that we do need to stand back from time to time, so that those batteries can be re-charged.

I have submitted chapters 4 and 5, having gotten some nice responses to chapters 1-3. There was a bit of delay because I had to do a bit of editing to bring Chapter 5 in line with this site's rules (chapter 5 contained a minor bit of non-spanking BDSM, and my inquiry about it suggested that it was best left out, and leaving it out was something I felt I could do without disrupting the story). Chapters 4 & 5 are actually all one scene, but it ran so long that I split it into two chapters. These chapters are "Richard" chapters, with no Pamela. They feature Richard while he is off at college, getting a bit more of an education than he had expected.

I decided to make some minor changes to the main female character in these chapters. Basically, I just changed her hair color. One of the things I emphasized before submitting Chapter 1 was that *this is not an incest story*. But, a recent re-reading of what I had already written kind of suggested to me that there were some unspoken incestuous ideas going on, or at least some readers might see that, despite that not being my intent (one of the benefits, I guess, of going back and reading your own writing 10 years later - you notice aspects that you didn't notice when you wrote it). The main female character in chapters 4 and 5, hinted at as a love interest for Richard, happens to be a redhead -- coincidentally having almost the exact same shade of red hair as Pamela. So I changed her to a brunette. I sincerely do not want this story to imply incest. On the other hand, in chapter 6 (a chapter I already need to do some editing on for site rules purposes; basically just replacing "14-year-olds playing strip poker" -- although, as currently written, there is nothing overtly sexual about the scene -- with some other kind of mischief that will still warrant a good spanking. Again, a change I can make without wrecking the story) ... in Chapter 6, there is a boy character who happens to be Pamela's "crush". And her friends tease her about him because they all think he's just like Richard. But Pamela doesn't get what her friends are on about. She realizes that her "crush" and her brother are both tall and both play football, but she doesn't see any other resemblance. I suspect that it's understandable for a 14-year-old girl, whose best friend is her big brother, to be attracted to a boy who resembles him -- it's already known that many women are attracted to men who remind them of their fathers, but I cannot see Pam being attracted to someone who reminds her of her father (chapter 7 makes it more clear why this is the case). I think I can leave that in. But having both that, and having Richard's love interest so strongly resemble Pamela was going a bit too far.

I think part of the problem is that, when I originally created these two characters, I deliberately designed each of them to represent ME. Two different aspects of myself. Hard to get more incestuous than that! Despite the fact that an incest story is not what I intended. So I'm doing some editing to take out things that might imply incestuous ideas.

Well done for trying, but when we present a story to the public we have no control over how it is understood. Each reader will bring their own, sometimes completely unexpected reading. Often this can happen without any textual evidence at all, for example a simple misreading of a word can put an idea into the mind and this then informs the remainder of the story. I'm sometimes surprised by the things my reader says about my stories, but every mind is different, and frequently they have spotted something I hadn't considered.

I agree with that, opb, and that's kind of how I'm looking at it. I am, if fact, quite a different person now than I was when I first wrote this story (or at least what I've written so far, as it's not complete), and I have a different outlook on life now that I'm approaching the age of 50 than I did when I was in my thirties. So, while I remember what my intent was when I wrote it, I can read it now with "new eyes" and pick up on unspoken things that my present-day mind interprets differently from the way my then-mind did.

... and you're probably even if not a better writer now than then, at least a more thoughtful one.

Since the discussion has become more about the story itself, rather than my writer's block, I thought it would be best to start a dedicated thread for discussion of this story. If anybody's interested :D

It's over here on the Storyboard:

http://www.thespankinglibrary.org/forum/2_3536_1.html

We can continue over there.

Erg, I'm WAY late responding to this, but ...

When he wrote the last few books, he knew he was dying. (In case you didn't know, he died from complications of AIDS, after contracting the HIV virus from a blood transfusion; Janet Asimov didn't reveal this until several years after his death.) So I suspect he knew how he wanted to wrap up the story, bringing together his Foundation and Robot universes, but he was under the constraint of not knowing how much time he had left. So, he just wrote, as fast as he could.

I was only in my mid-twenties when he passed (having discovered his work when I was ... 12? 13?), but I recognized the last book as a love letter to his wife. The ending of the last book, as Hari Seldon died, his last word was "Dors ..." ("Dors" was the name of Hari's wife.) "Dors ..." may as well have been, "Janet ..."

Asimov was the first writer I ever "got into". I believe that I have read almost every work of fiction he ever published, aside from a handful of "Black Widower" stories that I may have missed, and maybe some short stories he published late in life. The first of his books that I read were his "Lucky Starr" young adult novels, published under the pseudonym of "Paul French".

Well, I'm not certain that directly connecting the Foundation and Robot universes was necessarily a good idea, but as the author it was Isaac Asimov's prerogative, of course.

It simply struck me that Hari Seldon ended up seeming like a person who was manipulated, or at least strongly guided, by R. Daneel Olivaw in what he did--that's not how I envisioned the guy when I first encountered him in Foundation, and I prefer that original image of him as a great thinker who also became a man of action when the fate of civilization was involved.

Perhaps Asimov had hoped to work human interstellar society away from the situation he'd created in Foundation and Earth, wherein humanity's long-term fate was to be absorbed into some sort of galaxywide overall consciousness (I found that somewhat similar to the ultimate outcome in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End), but he died before he could do so. Otherwise, the efforts of the Foundation, while beneficial to human civilization at the time, wouldn't mean all that much over the long haul.

So what was Asimov's final novel...?? --C.K.

Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And when it is grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex

Clone, clone of my own
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex

-- Isaac Asimov

Can you work on the Pamala and Richard with a break in time. Both married or such. To allow you to use some of your learned skills without the changes being as obvious?