C.E.Murphy at Magical Words voices a lament about her current WIP:

“Realistically, I know what the problem is: the scene as I’m writing it sets up a direct conflict between my two main characters, and that’d be *great*…except I need a whole bunch more scenes before they can actually meet up. I need one more thing to go hugely, significantly wrong so that one character doesn’t just *kill* the other when they show up. And the scene as I’m writing it doesn’t allow for that.”

The headaches and heartaches of creating fiction — I so grok. The more life-like and ‘real’ my characters are, the more self-determining they are [which means they'll be authentic to themselves no matter what I might have plotted out for them] and the bigger those ‘aches tend to be.

C.E. also shares this bit, said to her by someone obviously not a writer: “I just kind of thought that somebody who did this professionally would just /know/ how to fix problems.”

What many fail to understand is that problems — in manuscripts and elsewhere — are unique critters. Each one will require a unique fix.

When I face this kind of problem I have to remind myself that it could be that in some part of my brain I’m writing a different book from the one I have up in Scrivener at the moment,… no surprise, considering we can consciously access a measly five to ten per cent of our brains [unless one is Stephen Hawking]. Who knows what else is going on below sea level in the rest of that cranial expanse?

What to do? It isn’t that I think my words are golden. But I’m loath to just throw them away, especially if I’ve sweated blood to produce them.

That, and I’ve learnt to gracefully accept *every* gift my Muse gives me.

Figuring out where each gift is supposed to go — and into which story — is my job. So I snip out those bits that [at the moment] don’t appear to belong, and save ‘em up in a folder I call ‘Cutting Room Floor’ to figure out later on where they truly belong,…

… the last thing I want to do is alienate my Muse by refusing a gift.