Let me set the scene for you when you get stuck. Because it isn’t a matter of if. It is when.
You are firing up your laptop, flexing your fingers because today is the end of your story. You’ve got one chapter left. You sit there, perky, cup of caffeinated beverage at your side. Publication is in your future, you can just taste it. Taste like umami and triumph.
Except…
Your fingers stick on the keys. That wonderful flow that has driven you endlessly forward, like a relentless fire under your toes, is gone. The characters turn their back on you and the plot gives you the middle finger. Frantically, you consult your notes and flip through all your notebooks. You read highlighted pieces, bits you’ve tried for backstory. In desperation, you even consult your old draft because maybe the hint is there! It must be!
But later, much later and after many attempts, you admit defeat. You’re stuck.
What happened?!?
Getting stuck is one of those horrifying moments as a writer where you feel powerless. No amount of cursing, rewriting, upside down head poses, or prayers to the gods helps you. It isn’t the same as writer’s block, in my experience; writer’s block is often a matter of motivation or even worse…often is your own mind saying no more and can be due to some health or stress. No. Being stuck is another animal; same family, different genus.
The problem with being stuck is that you can get stuck for long time and often on such a tiny part of your book. For me, I get stuck at the endings. I may have them outlined but I struggle to find my words. It happens and it’s normal.
So how do you get unstuck?
I’ve had some good luck with a couple of techniques that are a little unorthodox compared to some writers. My biggest rule for you is to not buy something to solve the problem. By something I mean a program or course. I’ve got it in for courses because for many online creators courses are more a chance to earn extra income and many actually don’t work well.
You don’t need a course. You need very little to fix this problem. You just need grit. So pull up your britches and hunker down with me.
Technique 1: Sit and do nothing
I have ADHD and apparently others with ADHD have this problem too where if you schedule in time to write, you are going to do other tasks to make it feel like you have more done and to feel like you have made space to write. But then you don’t write.
So I want you to make your usual writing time. Tea or coffee, laptop, notebook, whatever you usually have. You know you are going to be at that stuck chapter. And yes, you are. Sit down. Hands on the desk or table. Nothing there? Fine.
Sit.
Sit and do nothing. However long you slot your writing time, you are going to sit. You have two options. Sit and do nothing, or sit and write. Now at first you might think that ‘hey, sitting and doing nothing is so easy’ but you might find it isn’t. It gets harder. You get bored staring at the wall. So you itch to do something. But the rub here is that you can’t do anything but write.
Choose between the wall and your writing. Just make it easy to start your writing by starting a fresh page. Or start your next chapter.
Technique 2: Write Hot Garbage
Or cold garbage… whatever your pleasure. A positive when writing down just anything in your head, similar to The Writer’s Way advice for Morning Pages, is that you get out a weird stuffiness in there. The collection of garbage we hold onto as humans, much less humans who love to write, is pretty vast. Doing brain dumps, morning pages, anything that gets you writing out a steady stream of consciousness. Let it all out for about ten minutes or so.
Ten minutes up? Good. Step away from the page and take a walk, however long or short you need. Ready? Now go back and try writing something. Doesn’t have to be wonderful. You just need to write something in the area you are writing in.
Technique 3: Skip It
So sometimes you are stuck not on the whole book, but a section. How do you logically go from A to B when you have 20 points between? Borrow from screenwriters and outliners and cheat. Or…well, not cheat but skip it.
Say you have written this intro to a battle scene. You know how you want it to go. You’ve got a killer intro and a killer outro. But the middle? You are stumped.
I advise you to do this: Write the intro, then put in the middle in bolded curly brackets {BIG FIGHT SCENE. THIS PERSON DOES THIS THING, THEN THAT THING. SO AND SO DIES. HERO GETS THE GIRL} and skip onto the end. Remember that in the first draft you are just telling yourself the story. You don’t need to be perfect or need to know everything about it yet. You might discover later on that your character can’t fight worth a damn or has some special powers so your fight scene will need something more to compensate for that.
Skipping is ok. Don’t stress out over sections that you can come back to. Get the story down on paper and come back to it.
What if I am still stuck?
I would guess you are stuck because of perfectionism or boredom. Both can really through a wrench in your writing gears. No matter how great an author is, everyone has met their match with feeling stuck. If you remain stuck even after trying a couple things, you may have to do it for longer than you think. These things can take time and you almost have to tease out the stuck area and knit it into your project.
These techniques have been effective for me for when I can’t seem to make myself write. It works when you simply don’t feel like it but it also is effective for being stuck. Remember your drafts aren’t about perfection but about telling the story.
So stay imperfect, write it all out as you can, tackle the stuck moments, and keep writing.