This past weekend the movie Stranger than Fiction showed up in my mailbox courtesy of Netflix. I had found the idea intriguing when I’d seen the preview—a completely ordinary IRS tax agent begins hearing a narrator in his head accurately describing his life AND foreshadowing, not too subtly, his imminent demise.

I had time to watch the film because I was doing everything but writing. I’ve been blocked since the writing group reviewed my last submission, not because of feedback but mainly because, as the feedback showed, I had strayed into (for me) experimental territory and I wasn’t sure how to get myself back on the path of the story, which is to say how to get back to the business of killing one of my characters.

The movie began comfortably enough with the poor dull IRS agent brushing each of his 32 teeth 48 times (24 times up and down and 24 times side to side) and the voice of the narrator (Emma Thompson) comes in and starts describing this and the man freaks out a bit and I thought, “Oh what a lovely way to not write…er, I mean entertain myself for a few hours.”

Then cut to Dame Thompson, her toes over the ledge of a building tens of stories about the bustling city street. She jumps, but it’s only imagined. She’s a blocked writer trying to figure out the right way to kill her main character, the repressed IRS agent.

F**K! I can’t escape it even here, even nestled in my leather recliner with the cool night breeze coming in the window finally after surviving the day’s brutal humidity. For the next two hours I watch the tortured writer chew on the problem of her still-breathing character.

I didn’t resolve what to do in the book but I resolved to calm down about my process. I’m as captive to my own relationships with my characters as that writer was to her relationship with the ill-fated tax man. Of course, she resolves her problem in 123 minutes. The wait for me seems a bit longer.

This post was originally written June 13, 2007 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.