Help, I'm Stuck!
What to do when you get stuck in your writing (and why it's actually a good sign)
Good morning writers! How is your first draft coming along? I’m almost 90% of the way through mine! Sounds great, right? Well, it was going great, until I got stuck. So today, I’m going to talk about what it means when you get stuck on an idea when you’re almost done with it, and why I recommend going backwards to get unstuck instead of writing through it.
You might be wondering, how do you get stuck when you planned everything in your outline? Well, planners get stuck too! And believe it or not, it’s usually close to the end. I’m betting I’m not the only one stuck out there, or who will be stuck as they get into writing the last 10-20% of the draft. Why? Because an outline is a living document. You never follow it exactly.
Maybe somewhere in the first fifty pages I made a slight adjustment to the antagonist’s motivation, or changed my main character’s decision a hundred pages later so that now, in the run up to the end, my original outlined scene falls flat. Or maybe a detail that was a single sentence in the outline — “protagonist kills antagonist” — now needs to be thoroughly explored. Does he kill the antagonist? How? Why? Whatever the reason you get stuck at the end, I promise you, it’s a good thing! It means that as you wrote your story, you followed your characters lead. You didn’t just follow the points laid out in your outline, you discovered what makes your characters tick.
Have you ever heard a writer say their characters surprised them? This is what they’re talking about. They had a neat little plan for their characters to follow from point A to point B, but somewhere along the way, as they wrote and discovered the deeper layers of their characters, they realized, “My protagonist wouldn’t do that.” So, they had to figure out what their protagonist would do. If you follow your protagonist’s lead, by the time you get to the end of your book, your original plot might not work.
I find that most of the time, it’s not necessarily the final ending scene that doesn’t work. Instead, there’s a gap you need to bridge. At some point you get close to the ending and you realize that your protagonist isn’t exactly the protagonist you expected to have at this stage in the story. Once you realize that, you need to decide what the best way is to get yourself back on track to finish telling your story in the way you want to tell it.
So, do you keep pushing forward, or do you go back? Take a look at the scene that is making you stuck, and see if you can pinpoint what, exactly, is giving you trouble.
Let me give you an example from my current work in progress. In my case, my protagonist wasn’t the problem, it was my antagonist. In my outline, I had written a single line about how my protagonist was meant to learn about the forming of the antagonist’s organization. But I hadn’t actually thought that through. I knew what I wanted the protagonist to learn, and I knew it would reveal a key piece of information to her that she would need to move forward. But I wasn’t crystal clear on the motivations of forming the organization in the first place.
These kind of concrete details are something I struggle with in first drafts. Part of me likes to figure it out as I go, the first layer of tying my story elements together. But that means when I get to the end of my first draft, the motivations can be a little unclear. I couldn’t write this chapter, because I couldn’t make the antagonist believable without knowing what motivated him beyond a vague idea. The good news is even if it wasn’t in my outline, I had spent the first 85,000 words I drafted figuring out his motivation. Now, I just needed to channel it into the scene while figuring out the logistics of the scene itself. I thought I was on the right path, but about 850 words into the chapter, I got stuck again. It felt like I wasn’t starting in the right place, that it was taking me too long to get to the point of the scene, and that it was dragging. It wasn’t working. I went back to the drawing board.
Remember all those brainstorming activities we did in the beginning of the year? I returned to those exercises and started mapping out the plot points I knew I wanted to get across. Then I started brainstorming “What ifs?” I’m still working through the best way to tell this part of the story, but I did have a breakthrough: I was trying to tell it from the wrong point of view. Once that piece fell into place, it felt like the story offered me more options. Instead of trying to force my story to conform to the outline, it felt like I was discovering the shape the story was supposed to be.
And that meant I had to go back.
Now, I know there are lots of writers who don’t like to edit as they write their first drafts. I am not one of those writers. I’ll admit, sometimes, I go back and reread. I flesh out a setting or edit my prose. Sometimes, that’s just the kind of progress my brain wants to make that day. In this case, I needed to go back about 15 chapters and add a chapter in to make this new one work the way I intend it to. Now, I could make a new page in my doc and say “insert new chapter here,” but I won’t. I want to know everything my characters say and do in that earlier chapter to give me perspective when I get to that chapter close to the end. I want to know everything that has happened to them before that moment. It’s why I don’t like to write out of order.
So, push forward, or go back? I will always choose to go back. The one time I’d recommend pushing forward is if you are really truly stuck and no amount of brainstorming will get you to an answer that satisfies your story. In that case, it might be a sign of a bigger problem earlier in your book. I know, that sounds like a perfect reason to go back. But if you can’t pinpoint where and when the problem is, what are you going back to fix? It would just be a waste of time and energy, and leave you frustrated with your writing. In that case, I’d skip ahead. Get to the end. It could give you the answer you need. Did you tell the story you wanted to tell? Is your ending satisfying? If it is, that’s great news! Now you can go back. You have something to work towards. Retrace your steps, find that chapter that causes you to stumble, and pinpoint what’s not working.
Another reason to push forward is momentum. If the idea of going back to make changes disheartens you, then don’t do it. If you think going back will make you fail this challenge of finishing your first draft this year, then make a note to come back and fix that problem later. But if you’re like me, and can’t fathom moving forward if you haven’t laid a clear and complete path from the beginning? Then you, my friend, need to go back and fix your problem. This might be as small as changing a few lines or as big as replacing or adding chapters—only you can be the judge of that.
Here’s a tip for those of you who find that getting unstuck means going back and rewriting a big piece of your story: you don’t have to rewrite it now if you’re afraid you won’t finish your draft by the end of the year if you do. You can write yourself a new outline paragraph and stick it on the page as a correction to come back to. Then, move on with the rest of your drafting as if you’ve implemented that change already. When you can go back to edit your chapter, it will slot nicely into the rest of your plot. If there are any inconsistencies from writing out of order, you can smooth those out on the second draft when you revise.
Getting stuck happens! It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It’s simply a reminder that writing is fluid and flexible, that the thing you are creating is a living document, that first drafts take a bit of figuring out. So don’t sweat it if you find yourself writing paragraphs only to delete them again. Getting stuck is just part of the writing process.