A lot of you will know what I’m talking about when I mention the kind of back pain that feels like someone replaced part of your musculature with a bowling ball. The worst is when you feel part of your back, neck or shoulders stiffen, but you can’t quite pinpoint the root of the problem. Nothing seems to help– hot baths, heating pads, pain killers. You know that feeling when you’re ready to take a jackhammer to your back just to get it to relax? Yeah.

Stay with me– I promise this is relevant.

What actually got me thinking about this was getting a massage for some particularly heinous acute pain in my upper back this evening. Turns out it was trying to hide under my shoulder blade. It took awhile to find it, but there it was, curled up and withdrawn like a turtle. This pain had been plaguing me for days. After some coaxing, it relaxed and dissipated and I exhaled as if for the first time. That kind of relief is better than plunging a burnt finger into cold water, let me tell you.

Sometimes, writing is like that for me. Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying writing is painful. I love writing. Even in its most obstinate moments, it’s the love of my life.

But manuscripts can manifest their own breed of back pain. More often than not, it presents during the first and second revisions; I see it when I take a step back and look at the manuscript from a bird’s eye view.

Maybe it’s not so much that I see it, but feel it. That kink. That tension. Something is wrong, something is just slightly off. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s there, stiffening the over all structure of the story.

This has happened several times while working on Unidentified. I could feel the tangles and cramps in my story. When the novel tried to stretch, it doubled-over in pain. But where was that pesky knot in the muscle? Where should I massage it? Here? No, not quite. Maybe there…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone on two hour walks just to get it all sorted out in my mind. I pace the path circling a nearby park, headphones on, iPod at the ready. Massaging scene after scene, diving into character histories and motivations.

Then, suddenly, there it is. The knot. The tension. So I massage it, and I’m pretty ruthless. Someone’s going down– it’s me or the crick in the manuscript’s neck.

That might mean cutting an entire plot thread and integrating its central ideas elsewhere, or maybe combining two characters, or re-structuring three chapters. Whatever it takes to get that manuscript muscle to stop cramping.

At some point, I hit the sweet spot and it falls into place.

Then we’re dancing again, my novel and I. At least until another cantankerous story-muscle stiffens a different part of the plot. But each time it happens, my hands are a little stronger and the manuscript is a little more pliable, more responsive. With each round of revisions, each line edit, I smooth another knot and the body of the manuscript strengthens.

At times when you can tell there’s something “off” about your work-in-progress but you can’t quite put your finger on it, how do you figure it out? What do you do to massage the kinks out of your writing?