I was a few chapters into what would eventually become my first published novel, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl. I had my characters. I had my setting. I had a narrative voice that I was really starting to enjoy. I even had conflict and tension and all the stuff that’s supposed to go into a novel. And then it happened… I hit the wall. I had no idea where to go with the story that I was just beginning to fall in love with.
Boy, was I pissed, but I refused to give up. I sat in front of my computer screen and stared at what I’d written. My protagonist, a beleaguered mother of two named Audrey, was getting in way over her head with what she at first thought to be a casual drug habit. She had an inkling that she might have a problem. But she needed someone to help her see it. She needed someone to serve as a bulwark against the influence of the friends who encouraged her drug use. At the very least, she needed some kind of impetus to get her to start thinking about clawing her way out of the ever-deepening hole she’d dug herself into.
But what would that impetus be?
At the time I was writing my first draft of the novel, I could see a nursery school from my office window. More to the point, because it was summer and my windows were open, I could hear a nursery school from my office window. Usually, it was just the sound of kids playing, but on this particular day, I could hear a drumbeat and someone shouting into a microphone: Come on out, Tigerman!
The shouting went on for a good thirty seconds until Tigerman came out and proceeded to rap about a number of subjects, saying no to drugs and bullying being chief among them. It went on for a long time, and all the while I kept thinking, Would you please shut the hell up? Can’t you see I’m trying to write a novel here?
I was, after all, kind of cranky, as I’d been stricken with writer’s block all morning.
But then it hit me. This guy was rapping about saying no to drugs. It was exactly what my character needed to hear. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. Maybe what my novel needed was a real live superhero.
And so I started thinking about the kind of person who might make a living dressing up like a superhero and telling kids to keep away from drugs. And since Tigerman was obviously able to draw a crowd, I figured a feline superhero was the way to go. After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with Captain Panther, who turns out, I think, to be the unlikely moral anchor of the novel.
Needless to say, I did all of the grunt work of creating Captain Panther. That is, I invented a back story for him. I gave him a job in the real world. I wrote songs for him. I gave him insecurities and doubts and all of the other foibles that plague the rest of us. And I also gave him a good heart, so that he could be there to nudge Audrey in the right direction. But none of it would have been possible if I’d slammed my window shut and stayed holed up in my little bubble of literary paralysis.
If there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this, it’s probably that writers need to live in the world. The old adage that truth is stranger than fiction certainly held true in this particular instance. And by being open to that strangeness — by being willing to incorporate some of the wonder of the real world into a piece of fiction that I’d been struggling with — I was able to open my novel up to a whole world of possibilities.
So the next time you’re stuck, try stepping away from your manuscript for a moment and taking a look at the real world for a while. You never know what it might be trying to tell you.
Abominations 
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