Seven Ways (or five or three) to Improve Your Character Studies, Seven Ways to Improve Your Plot Development, or Seven Ways to Make Your Manuscript a Best Seller: These type of articles seem to be a trend.

After all, how long does it take to read seven items? So they entice us to slow down for a moment and actually read.  Okay, I guess it’s rather a good idea.

Seven Ways Writing Can Ruin Your Relationships

1.  You’ve been up late every night writing, heavy duty revising, and tossing out all redundancies. The next morning your “other” starts telling you a long winded story with unnecessary explanations and being quite redundant.   You’re exhausted and quite impatient.  You snarl and snap at your Sweety Pie.

2.  Your Poohbear has learned to shorten verbal tales, but now you don’t believe them.  You want facts.  You’re looking deeper.  There has to be more to it. There’s bound to be a plot twist in that tale.  Denial and grumbling take over.

3.  The love of your life starts a story, backtracks, and restarts somewhere else.  You can’t follow the plot and you lose it.  You shout, “Where in the @#$ is this story going?

4.  Now you’re at a difficult chapter in your manuscript.  You’re listening to those voices in your head who are about to solve some deep seated conundrum in your twisted plot.  Your Sugar Plum takes a sip of coffee and touches you.  You give an attentive look, but the two of you know you were lost out there in space somewhere ignoring everything at the breakfast table.

5. The two of you decide to have a romantic rendezvous.  Just as the candles are lit you visualize something that will further your plot.  You spend the next two hours questioning the waitstaff, the desk clerk, the housekeeper, the window washer, and the doorman.

6.  You’ve finished the scene where your main character suffers the a death of a loved one.  You’ve worked long and hard on this chapter.  Now, thinking about it, you get tears in your eyes. You’re all choked up, you can’t shake the mood.  Your Dearest One waltzes in and tells you about this hilarious event that just happened.

7.   You’re fingers fly across the key board.  Scenes come into focus, voices ring true, and events click into place.   The rest of the world sleeps. Honey Bucket has given up and gone to bed.   Your dog looks up at you and whines.   Dogs are awfully faithful, even when abused.

Solutions:

Sigh!  I don’t have any.  When you’ve got to write, you’ve got to write.  Maybe you could give extra hugs, explain a lot, and apologize.  Do you have answers?  If not, I hope you have a dog.