You need to cease reading this particular post and plot your escape! Go. Now. Quickly. Before it's too late!
You can't do it, can you? It's not as easy as it sounds, is it?
Want to know what is even more difficult?
Escaping the conundrum of writing yourself into a corner.
Yep, that is correct. Here I am, with two of my main characters in my latest novel; wandering through the mountains east of Egypt on a journey to the Red Sea when a fierce wind swept over us with heavy rolling clouds and the low rumble of an angry god warning us to seek cover. We raced into a cave just as a downpour drenched the region, illuminated by flashes of light in the sky and we found ourselves cornered by a mysterious figure that shadowed our every move since our arrival in the mountains.
The predicament?
Well, first, we are losing time now being trapped inside a cave and roaming deeper into the earth when we should be continuing our journey east to the sea. Our goal is to travel north by boat and arrive at the ports of Egypt along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Once there, we have to concoct a plan to infiltrate the country & find Kanika, but how will we manage this when my Nubian friends aren't permitted to enter the Two Lands?
When you write yourself into a corner, do not fret, my friends. Take a step back, breathe, and read. Yes, you heard correctly. Read.
Read something that pertains to your frame of mind, or read a novel that you enjoy escaping into. You can't unlock a lock by using the Force. Believe me, I've attempted this feat and almost had an aneurysm! To unlock a lock, you need a key -or a safety pin for those of you with rather unscrupulous methods- and you must insert that key, and turn.
Fortunately for me, I have a vast personal library of books on Ancient Civilizations, Mythology, Deities and Demons. I escaped this realm and fell into the legends of the past...I essentially journeyed through inter-dimensional space and time to unlock the lock.
Do I thank God, the gods, the fates or just plain old good fortune? I'm not quite sure, yet, but certainly I am grateful for what transpired. I figured out how to evade the dreaded dead-end by weaving together fact and myth, with a wave of my "soft-tip red-ink Bic" wand. (Sorry to say that it does not possess a phoenix feather at the core). I formulated a new plot twist to strengthen my story, increase the intrigue and make matters worse for my protagonist.
I achieved my escape without leaving my seat. Come to think of it, I've often been an escapist. Just ask my teachers. I often daydreamed in class, writing or drawing, and seldom did my homework because my mind was always somewhere else in some other realm. Imagining a story or reading chapters in my history books that I wasn't supposed to read because I needed to escape...I needed to learn more than what I was being taught. Even then, I was formulating a plan for how I would flee from the stagnant world I knew to create a better life for my family.
It isn't easy, but despite my life choices, scripting my fate and writing myself into a corner, I'm still writing and I will successfully emulate Houdini's act of escaping the inescapable.
"All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape." ~A.C. Benson
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