Story Stumped
- Chance
- Aug 28
- 3 min read
The Writers Block of writers block. This book has put me through much pain, resistance, and absolute devastation.
I have mixed feeling about this book because fittingly it is both a blend of simple fast flowing writing and absolutely deadlocked writing with no progress at all. Firstly this is what Story Stumped is all about.
Ryan has to write a story for school. the problem is that he is Story Stumped. He is suffering from really bad writers block and his friends try to help him find inspiration out but nothing seems to work. He is playing basketball when a subtle spark shines in his mind followed by another and another until he has written his story.
Back in 2020 I was not only able to finish writing this book but I handed the story to Pascha and she finished these fun illustrations also in a timely manner.
Pasha had a blast with this one. With it being based on writing, lined paper was going to incorporated into the text page. So what goes best with struggling to write? DOODLING!
I asked Pascha just to create doodles and I would then attach them to the pages afterward. She had a lot of fun working on this book creating nonsense characters and designs.
We finished the entire book did the Author Picture and even set up the formatting for this title but there was only one thing missing.
We didn't have a The End page drawn out for one single reason. We decided this book would end with a short bonus story. I can't tell you how many hours I sat staring at the dreadful blank page. The text cursor teasing me, taunting me with how simple of a topic I've given myself. A short story that comes from child's imagination shouldn't be that difficult to create.
Overall I would go so far as to say I don't think I've ever had this much trouble creating a simple story before. There are other upcoming projects I haven't fully ironed out the issues yet that are simpler than this.
There were 3 rules I had when writing this bonus story.
It has to be short, (no more than a couple hundred words)
It has to be simple (No The Silent Reality styled content)
It has to fit what the character would write about.
There was a single optional rule I had in mind.
Implement at least in part the elements used in the book or I could go meta or have Ryan's story about not being able to write a story ultimately making the book the story about being unable to write a story. Making the book his short story that he wrote.
I would start attempting and my personal Spidey-sense would kick in saying something was wrong. Typically that the story concept would be too long. I came up with two different attempts stopping short of finishing it because I knew beforehand it would become too long.
Ultimately the inspiration became a blend of a short story I wrote when I was thirteen titled Two Worlds.
Two Worlds was a rejected The Silent Reality short "dream" story that I wrote shortly after writing The Unspoken Side. Two Worlds was about the contrast between urban and rural living. (Two Worlds was actually a story I shared along with Unspoken Side at baking farmers markets to promote The Silent Reality release five years prior.)
Taking the concept I blended it with Basketball and that's how I created this bonus story. The Bonus story is settled at 200 words fitting the entire book at One Thousand Words.
A really cool detail I want to highlight with this new author picture, I'm using the same clipboard in this picture as I used in The Silent Reality author picture.
When we were busy going around posing for this picture Tattered joined us. His presence this picture was as coincidental as Ollie sitting over us watching . (Just over the clipboard.)
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