About three weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on avoidance, perhaps otherwise known as writers block. The scene I was working on describes what is, perhaps, the climax of the entire tale, in which Our Hero brings himself to perform a difficult act, the very last thing he ever wanted to do. And moves on. I knew what was in the scene. I had gone over it a dozen times in my head. But it seemed like everything in my life, even the time spent actually at my computer, conspired to take precedence over actually writing the scene down.

I have to confess that I’d half hoped that writing that blog post might open whatever gate was closed and allow me to write the darned scene already.

But it didn’t happen quite that way. What actually happened was that I managed to continue to avoid writing the scene for another week. And then one night while lying in bed not quite sleeping, I went through the scene again. A new character showed up this time–not new to the story, but new to the scene. And when this character showed up, the nature of the scene changed. It got more complicated and interesting, and a lot less dismal.

The next day I started writing. I wrote the pivotal moment in the scene.

Over the last two weeks I have also completed half a dozen scenes leading up to that final scene, detailing Our Hero’s struggle to avoid the act he has been cornered into. And I completed the scene itself, tying the pivotal moment into all that leads up to it. And I even wrote the one small scene needed afterwards. In all, I’ve written well over 7,000 words in two weeks, more than a tenth of the entire novel so far—not exactly fast enough for National Novel Writing month, but probably about as much as I’ve ever succeeded in writing in any two-week period. And hey, you know what? It’s pretty good stuff!

So maybe, just maybe, the scene was resisting me all this time because it wasn’t the right scene yet.