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Some ways to unstick your writing
Whether you’re someone who pre-plans heavily, or someone who makes everything up as you go, we all occasionally come to a point in the story where the scene just stops.
Maybe you don’t know how a character should reply to something, or how they should react to an event. Maybe you don’t know whether an action they’re taking should be successful or fail. Or maybe you just don’t know what happens next at all.
Here are some ways to break through that wall.
📝 Have someone you trust write the next line for you. Then you can jump off of that, or if you don’t like what they’ve written, knowing why and correcting it can get your writing flowing again.
📝 Roll the dice. Think of some possible outcomes of the event or things for your character to say next, and then roll dice and proceed with whichever it lands on. If you don’t like the outcome, knowing why and correcting it can get your writing flowing again.
📝 Skip to the next part you know happens. Yes skip it. Just skip the scene that’s giving you trouble. You have permission. You can come back and write it later if the scene needs to be there.
📝 Write the next part deliberately badly. Just go nuts, ham it up. Have the proverbial ninjas burst through the door. You don’t have to keep whatever you end up writing in the story, but just getting writing again can help you figure out where to go next.
📝 Delete a little bit that you’ve written, and start writing again from that point. Okay don’t literally delete it, copy it into another document in case you decide you need it later. But maybe the reason you’re stuck is because the last couple of sentences or paragraphs led you to a dead end and you need a fresh start.
📝 Explain the scene or even the whole story to someone willing to listen. In programming this is called ‘rubber duck debugging’. Often when you’re stuck on a problem just the act of explaining it to a person– or an inanimate rubber duck– will lead to a breakthrough of what that problem is.
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