by Molly MacRae
First published on May 2, 2021 in Writers Who Kill, reprinted with permission
Interruptions happen. To anyone, in any job. There you are, at home or at work, engrossed, productive, in the zone, when something happens to interrupt you. A cat or co-worker (sometimes the same thing) has a question. An important call or customer requires your attention. A machine blinks twice and dies.
Speaking as a writer, that break in concentration can snuff the glimmer of an idea that just sparked or frighten away the perfect word the moment before I swoop it into my word net. This kind of interruption is part of life, though. These interruptions often feed our creative lives, and they’re usually easy enough to recover from.
LIFE, though. The one in all caps. LIFE has a way of delivering unavoidable, industrial-sized interruptions that aren’t so easy to get past. These great gaps in creative output aren’t all due to dire or tragic circumstances (though many are). Some are joyful, some pedestrian. The nature of these yawning chasms in our writing productivity doesn’t really matter. They all break the thread of our story and cut the lines of communication with our characters, and that feels like another kind of tragedy. Especially to a writer on a deadline. Notice the “dead” in deadline. Makes me shudder.
Over the past dozen years several near-catastrophic fissures have opened between me and books I meant to finish on time. We’re talking interruptions that lasted six weeks and more. How did I get back into those stories? Going over my notes and outlines helped. So did reading the manuscript up to the point where I stopped. Those activities mended the threads of the stories. They showed me how the characters coped with the pickle I dropped them into before leaving them and not returning for far too long.
It still feels hard to get back into actually writing, though. I’ve felt distant from the characters’ lives and conversations, their tensions and conflicts. For all I knew, they got on perfectly well without me. That sounds needy, but a writer needs her characters. So, here’s what I’ve done, on occasion, to reopen the lines of communication—I’ve written one of the characters a short, friendly letter asking how they are, what’s up, and to please write back.
When I wrote to Kath Rutledge, main character in the Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries, she got back to me almost immediately with a ten-page letter that had everything I needed to be off and writing again. Toward the end of that book, Plagued by Quilt, I wrote her again to see if she knew more than I did about how she and her posse from the yarn shop planned to catch the killer. Of course she did; that’s why I made her the protagonist in the first place. She shot a six-page letter back to me and the whole experience felt very satisfying.
So, my advice if you’re flummoxed by a long or short interruption or stumped by what happens next, is talk to the experts—your characters. Write them or call them. They’re standing by and they’ll be happy to hear from you.
Writers, what tips do you have for restarting after LIFE interrupts your writing routine?
Molly MacRae writes the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, about four women who reinvent their lives when they buy a bookshop in Inversgail on the west coast of Scotland, and the award-winning Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries, about a textile preservation specialist in Blue Plum, Tennessee, who ends up with a depressed ghost on her hands. Molly spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northeast Tennessee, where she managed the Book Place, an independent bookstore, may it rest in peace.
