The Edge of the Writing Cliff

Late Tuesday afternoon, the long-awaited revisions on my YA contemporary popped into my inbox.  I opened it up, read it, and let out a not so eloquent HUH?  Confused and more then a bit terrified, I did the only logical thing.  I restarted me email and pushed the send and receive button, convinced I had misread the suggested revision . . . that the real one was just lost out there in cyber-space. Unfortunately not! 

I then proceeded to walk to the edge of that cliff us writers are so familiar with, the one that screams “you can’t do this” at us from a million miles below. I promptly hurled myself over the edge and got stuck halfway down.  That someone that broke my fall – my amazingly patient and brilliant agent. 

With nothing more then a calming “I have faith in you,” she led me back up the side of the mountain and away from the edge.  She tossed some ideas out at me, gave me a beginning and an ending point, then told me if I got stuck anywhere along the road just to shout out.  She’d come back to my elusive cliff and help me plot out that perplexing scene or figure out my characters next move. So although that cliff still looms in the distance, my agent has single handily erected a concrete wall around the edge of it and plastered a no-trespassing sign.

We have all hit that point in our writing career at on time or another . . . that place in our subconscious that has us wanting to simply give up. Who do you turn to then?  Who walks you back from that ledge?