For a writer who’s under contract, there’s no help for it but to slog on and hope the juice comes back before the deadline arrives. A writer who isn’t under contract can dump the story and move on to something else, which may or may not be the right decision, but which is always a hard decision.

Abandoning a story halfway through – truly abandoning it, without mumbling about coming back to it someday – is not an easy thing, even when the writer knows for certain that the story has gone totally cold and isn’t likely to warm up any time in the next couple of centuries. And a lot of the time “losing interest” isn’t really about the story going cold.

So what is it about, then? Well, what kinds of things make one reluctant to sit down and work on a story?

1) The plot and/or characters have gotten predictable, pedestrian, and boring…at least as far as the writer is concerned. Sometimes, this is because the writer has more experience as a reader; the idea that seemed fresh and exciting when she started writing turns out to have been fresh only because the writer hadn’t run across the multitude of similar stories doesn’t look so cool when she’s reading the forty-leventh story of the same type. Sometimes, the predictability is simply because the writer has been reviewing the plot too often and too much, and she’s gotten to know it too well. Some writers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others; the extreme case is the writer who gets bored with the story if she knows anything about what comes next.

2) The story is technically more than a little too stretchy, and the writer is tired of not being able to get it down properly and sees no prospect of ever getting it the way he wants it. A writer who feels as if he is making progress is usually willing to hang in there, but banging your head against a stone wall is not something anyone wants to keep doing if they have a choice.

3) The writer has taken so long to write the story that they have outgrown their interest in the premise, the plot, or the characters. The novel I started writing in 7^th grade never really even reached the mid-point of the story; by the time I’d gotten thirty or so pages into it, I wanted to write better-conceived, more consistent, more grown-up stories. So I left it and never looked back. The same thing can happen to adult writers; the plots and worlds and characters and problems I was deeply interested in when I was in college don’t draw me any more.

4) The writer finds she has said everything she had to say about those characters or subject. This one usually affects writers who’ve been writing a series, often a popular, long-running one. After a while, you get to the point where you’re just done with those people or that place.

5) The writer has taken so long to write the story that the real world has overtaken his premise. This one is a problem for people who do modern, real-world, or near-future stories; the classic example is the way the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s affected all the writers who were in the middle of writing spy thrillers involving the U.S.S.R. when the collapse happened. Any real or near-future story that involves technology in a central way is extremely vulnerable to this kind of thing – what looks like a cutting-edge computer when you’re writing it may very well look like it dates from the last century when the story actually comes out.

6) The story may be moving inexorably in a direction the writer simply doesn’t want to go for some reason. The intricate murder-mystery is turning into a drawing-room comedy, and the writer hates drawing room comedy and is just not going to write it, that’s all. Or perhaps the fast-paced action-adventure is insisting on becoming a psychological drama within a couple of chapters, and that particular psychological drama cuts a little too close to home for the writer to want to write about it now (or, maybe, ever).

Some of these problems are fixable; others aren’t. If the world overtakes your near-future plot, there’s not much you can do; they’re not going to roll back the Arab Spring just so your novel will still work. If, however, you’re just bored and finding the plot predictable, you can often change things up to rekindle your interest (this is the origin of the well-known advice about having ninjas jump in through the window if you’re stuck). Outgrowing your story or your series is a good thing, at least in a personal sense (though if one has been making one’s living from a series one can no longer stand to write, it seldom seems so at the time).

The main thing, though, is to be quite, quite certain that one really has lost interest, and is not simply avoiding writing a tricky or unpleasant bit that’s coming next. Because one cannot avoid the tricky and unpleasant bits completely or forever, and while it probably doesn’t hurt to abandon one novel or story in the middle every so often, abandoning a whole string of them sets up a pattern of bad habits that can be really hard to break.

Most of the writers I know of use one of three basic methods to get past this point: 1) Power on through; 2) Composting; 3) Plot Noodling.

Powering on Through works best for those writers who like to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just make it up as they go along, and for those who actually do know “what happens next” but who for some reason just don’t want to be bothered writing it down. (For me, it’s usually because the sticky bit that comes next is going to be an explanation of something or a transition scene, and I purely hate writing explanations and transitions. Other writers have different stuff on their hate lists.) Powering on through is just what it sounds like: you sit down and write something, anything, to get past the sticky bit.

The trouble with powering on through is that if you aren’t the sort of writer who makes it up as they go, or don’t know what happens next, it may not get you anywhere useful. You can end up with two or three chapters that are totally wrong, and have to go back and pitch them, which is painful. It’s a particularly bad idea if what the story actually needs is more development, which is what the other two methods do.

Composting is my term for letting the story sit in one’s backbrain until it’s ready to grow things. This is the one where you stick the story in a drawer or file somewhere and work on other stuff. Periodically — every couple of months, say, or if you’re really busy, maybe once a year — you pull it out and look at it and see if it’s ready to be a story yet. You do this in order to gently remind your backbrain that it is supposed to be working on this story. This one works well for people who have so many possible stories to do that they don’t have to develop any one in particular because they’ve got plenty of other ones to work on in the meantime, for people who get bored easily by working only on one project, and for people who like to maximize production time by rotating from one story to another while they’re waiting.

The trouble with composting is that there’s a tendency to end up with a whole heap of WIPs or UFOs (UnFinished Objects)…and no finished projects. This problem seems to be particularly common for relatively new writers, but it can strike anyone. It helps to go back over everything in the compost pile once every month or two, like stirring a real compost pile to keep it cooking. It also helps to be really determined about working on things, and perhaps to try the next method from time to time.

Plot Noodling basically involves taking the idea you have and the chapters you have written and looking at them very carefully, poking at them and turning them over and looking for loose threads and rough edges and incomplete background and generally trying to figure out what it is you need to know in order to move on. “What it is you need to know” is, quite often, backstory: How did this character get into this mess? What have all the other characters, especially the villains/antagonists, been doing? What is the goal each of the main characters is trying to head for (and it may be “I want to get home and not be bothered with swords in stones and saving the country!”)? What are the possible things that can interfere with each of these goals (especially the main character’s)?

Sometimes, one also needs to clearly define what constitutes “winning” the situation for the Hero — or, to put it another way, what sort of ending you’re heading for. Is the ultimate resolution going to be the wedding, or the defeat/death of the dragon, or the main character wrestling with temptation (again) and winning at last? Some writers need a goal to aim for; others are better off with a general sense of direction.

Plot Noodling often works best if you can find someone who is good at asking you the sorts of questions you haven’t thought about asking yourself, but you can learn to do it all on your own (and in my experience, at least, there aren’t a whole lot of people who are good at asking the right sorts of questions without considerable training, so you may be best off planning to do it yourself). It can often be profitably combined with Composting — you poke at the story and make some notes and think about the obelisk or the missing sword or the international political situation (the one in the story, not the real-life one), and then put the manuscript away for a couple of days or weeks. When you bring it out, you poke at it some more, have a brilliant idea about a useful minor character and a possible plot twist, make more notes, and set it back to compost some more.

Eventually, it reaches the point where when you pull it out, you realize that all the pieces are there and it’s ready to grow roses. (One of my friends refers to this stage as “the story reaching critical mass,” but that works for nuclear bombs, not compost…) And then you sit down and write it, until you hit the next wall or the next veil and the process starts all over again.

When you want your characters to go left, and they want to go right, there are three things you can do: 1) Just keep going as originally planned; 2) Figure out some solid reason why these people can’t go the way they want; or 3) Go ahead and let them go right after all, and see what happens.

I’ve never had much luck with #1. Forcing characters to do what I’d planned instead of what those particular characters would do just never works for me; at best, I get stuck for ages, while at worst I manage to plow onward for several chapters, which eventually have to be thrown out. My characters turn instantly to cardboard in my head (well, they would – I’m basically turning them into puppets acting out the plot, rather than developed characters with attitudes and likes and opinions unique to them). It works for some writers though.

#2 has been very useful on a number of occasions. The simplest was when I had a large group on the move, for whom the most logical thing to do was to go around the kingdoms instead of trying to fight their way through; I put a nearly-impassable swamp in the middle of their logical route, thus making it faster to fight through the kingdoms (and speed was a consideration, as they were being chased). Two or three lines during the which-way-do-we-go discussion, and I was all set. Geography is so useful.

A lot of the time, though, forcing the issue isn’t that simple and requires more setup, especially when a physical barrier isn’t enough or isn’t reasonable.  Say I’m faced with characters who want to hide in the woods when I need them to stop at the inn so they can encounter a bunch of other characters and move the plot along. Starting a forest fire to drive them to the inn would work, but would also end up with a whole lot more plot complications.

So instead, I think for a bit about what could happen/might already have happened that would make these particular characters decide that stopping at the inn is a good idea instead of a bad one. There are a couple of people they really, really want to meet up with; perhaps they catch a glimpse of one of them on the road? Or maybe I can go back to their last stop and plant a rumor…what would intrigue them enough that they’d decide to check it out despite the risk? Maybe I need to go back even farther, and give them reason to think there’s evidence they need at the inn (which means they’ll want to come up with a plan to get hold of it while avoiding being seen/identified…yes, that’s got some meat to it).

In other words, I’m not changing who the characters are; I’m changing their circumstances, what they already know (and therefore, what they think they need to know), in order to get them to go where I want them to go so that the things I need to have happen will indeed happen. It can take a while to come up with appropriate (and non-obvious) shifts that fit the plot, and sometimes it takes quite a bit of rewriting of earlier stuff to get them all in, but it can work quite well.

Or, it can not-work, not at all. In which case I’m left with #3 – let the characters ignore the inn and see what happens. There are two sub-possibilities for this: 3a – The characters don’t do what I wanted, and as a result, their situation gets Much Worse (because they weren’t at the inn to see the bad guys getting ready for the attack, so they didn’t know to try to stop it, and now the person they wanted to talk to is dead and the Sekrit Dokuments are on their way to the head villain); or 3b – The characters don’t do what I wanted, and as a result, something entirely different happens, the whole story takes a sharp right turn and I have to completely rework what I thought was going to happen.

3a requires putting some thought into what the bad guys are doing (assuming there are bad guys) while my heroes are out camping, and also thinking about what other things could happen to make the situation worse because they’re not paying attention to the things that need attending to. Maybe while they’re out chasing down bad guys, the flooding river is slowly washing away the foundation of the manor house. Maybe ignoring the first mysterious death means that now there are three more mysterious deaths. Maybe the bad guys have plenty of time to translate the Sekrit Dokuments and get the jump on them. Basically, having a plot means that things are going wrong for the characters somewhere, somehow – and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you don’t take care of a problem or situation while it’s still small, it’ll get bigger. So if my characters don’t take care of whatever, it’ll get worse while they’re ignoring it, until they can’t ignore it any more.

3b is really annoying when it happens, but it usually results in a much more interesting book. For one thing, if I wasn’t expecting the characters to get caught by the police and have to stay in town, the readers are unlikely to be expecting it, either. For another, if I wasn’t expecting the heroes to have to handle this situation, neither they nor the villain were expecting it, either, and they’ll all have to come up with new plans on the fly, which tends to make for a lot more story possibilities.

The annoying part is that if what happens next is that different from what I’d expected, I nearly always have to ditch most of my plot and planned events and come up with new ones. But if it makes for a better story, I don’t really have any excuse not to.

Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.”

Me: “Sounds familiar.”

Writer (despairing): “How do you decide what comes next?”

Me (frowning slightly): “That’s not really your problem yet.”

Writer: “Huh?”

Me: “You can’t make a decision until you have something to decide. Right now, you have nothing.”

Writer (wails): “So what do I do?”

Me: “Make stuff up. Then you decide whether it’s useful, because you’ll have something to decide about.”

At which point I got a blank look, but after a bit more discussion (OK, a couple of hours worth), she did get things back on track. The problem was that the writer was looking too far ahead. She was trying to think about the next scene, the next chapter, what the next exciting bit was going to be, how to get her characters from the bottom of the ravine to the triumphant climax of the novel. What she wasn’t thinking about was the very next step.

Getting to that step can be a little trickier than it sounds (which is why it took a couple of hours). First, you have to be clear about where the characters are. Where is their location? What do they know (or think they know) at this exact point in the story? And most important of all, what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?

What the characters think they need to accomplish right now – whether it’s rescue someone from the villain’s dungeon, or head to the cafe for a well-deserved cup of coffee after having decimated the wolf pack that was (they think) eating the sheep – will play a large part in determining the next step they take, and what direction they take it in. If they want to rescue a companion from a dungeon, the cautious one will want to plan a rescue mission and then get some supplies, while the reckless one may grab a musket and head for the lockup, but whatever they pick as the very next thing to do, it will take them in the direction of the dungeon, not in the direction of the coffee shop.

Sometimes there are multiple ways in which the characters can proceed. If they have just realized that the villain is up to something, and that they need to find out what, they may spend some time discussing the best way to find out, or they may go running off instantly in a variety of possible directions. Once the writer recognizes this, the first step is to figure out what the likely possibilities are.

Then one has something to decide: would these particular, individual characters, in this particular situation, do A, or B? If they need to find something out, will they stay in the ravine and plan for a few hours, dash back to town as a group to check the local gossip sheet, or send one of their number off to the oracle while the others compile lists of things to investigate and people to question?

Having made this first decision – what is the next step, or the next several steps, that the characters are going to take to try to do what they need to do – one has a second thing to decide: whether it is interesting and relevant enough to show in detail, or whether one would be better off skimming lightly past all the planning and dashing around, and going straight to the meeting three days later when they tell each other what they’ve found and realize, to their horror, that things are much worse than they thought.

The second decision is more complex, because it’s not only a decision about whether the next few things your characters choose to do are interesting and relevant; it’s also a decision about whether the writer can or should try to make them more interesting by throwing in something unexpected or having something go totally wrong. A trip to the library to check the microfiche of the 1851 newspapers that haven’t been digitized yet may not rate a full-blown scene if that’s all that happens, and sometimes what the writer wants is to say “Three days later, they got together and Gerald told them what he’d found.”

Sometimes, though, the trip to the library is the perfect opportunity for the secondary villain to send a thug after Gerald to collect that gambling debt, or for an unexpected car accident, or a fire at the library, or an apparently unrelated attack by mutant ninjas on the library. So the writer has to decide: is this worth making into a scene on its own, and if not, do I add something to make it something worth showing? Or would that be too distracting? What does it do to the pace and the plot development and the characterization if I show or don’t show the scene – and which is more effective for the story I want to tell?

My writer friend was trying to start by knowing about the gambling and the fire and the ninjas, before she even knew that the characters were going to send Gerald to the library. What she really needed was to back up, slow down, and think about what her characters needed to do next, one tiny step at a time. (And not just the characters in the ravine – the villain wasn’t just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the heroes to show up and thwart him, after all.)

We are afraid of looking foolish; we are afraid of rejection; we are afraid of overreaching, of not knowing how, of getting it wrong, of not being good enough. We’re afraid of being broke, being taken advantage of, being stuck with something that turns out to be a bad deal. We’re afraid that the idea that seemed so brilliant a week or a month or a year ago is not brilliant at all, only nobody is quite willing to say so. We’re afraid that in choosing to write this story, we’re letting a much better one get away.

Fear is paralyzing. It affects everything: creativity, the mechanics of planning and working and sending things out, even the simple enjoyment of telling a story you really want to tell. Everything is suspended, like hitting a permanent “pause” button on life, because as long as one doesn’t move, none of the things one is afraid of can possibly happen.

But fear is a natural part of doing anything new. Everybody is nervous the first time they exercise a new skill, and triply so if they’re doing it in public. What a lot of folks don’t take into consideration is that for writers, every book is a new thing. Yes, we develop skills over the years, but they’re always being applied to a new story. “You’re only as good as your latest book” is an industry truism, and it’s just as scary a thought for bestselling veterans as it is for struggling mid-list writers and beginners.

I think that a lot of the problem stems from the difficulty of the balancing act all writers face. On the one hand, one must believe in the value and quality of one’s work, else one would never send it out. On the other hand, one must believe that there is room for improvement, or one will never get any better. It’s a teeter-totter, and when it gets out of whack, it’s all too easy to end up in a frozen panic.

The other problem is that writers have a difficult time trusting themselves. We know that the stuff we turn out isn’t perfect; if we didn’t realize that to begin with, our crit groups and friends and editors would straighten us out in a big hurry. We have to know that it’s not going to be perfect and do it anyway. And every so often, the teeter-totter tips and the fear goes up and we stop.

Getting past the fear happens in different ways for different writers at different times. I think the key is to recognize it and admit what’s going on. It’s a lot harder to make excuses about not writing when you’ve taken a long, hard look at yourself and admitted that really, you’re just scared to mess up. Support from friends is vital – the sort of friends who won’t simply dismiss the problem.

Experience helps, too. The first time I had to redo seven chapters of a manuscript, it took me a solid year (after I figured out that was what I needed to do) to sit down and start ripping the manuscript apart, because I was afraid that whatever I came up with instead was going to be even worse than what I already had. The second time, it took me a bit over eight months. The third time, it took about two weeks, and the enormous reduction in elapsed time was due entirely to the fact that I recognized the situation and the feeling, so that I could roll my eyes at myself and decide that it would be silly to waste all that time when I knew what I had to do, and that I was eventually going to do it.

Taking small steps, or even just zooming in on the details, can make a big difference. Yes, I’m afraid my novel won’t be any good, but right now, I just have to think about this one scene, this one paragraph, this one sentence. And then the next sentence…but not until I get to the next sentence.

Which is another part of the trick: setting the future aside. Because the future is what fear is all about – all the horrible things that might happen, that we might not be able to handle if and when they do. Some of them are inevitable – death, taxes, rejection – and there’s no point in worrying about what you can’t keep from happening. Other fears are phantoms. But the only thing any of us can actually do anything about is whatever we’re doing right now this minute.

Not writing a sentence because I’m afraid my novel will end up being terrible, I’ll look foolish, I’ll be rejected…well, that seems like an awful lot to load onto one measly sentence. Sometimes, it really is better to look at the small picture for a little while.

It’s the same way with writing; you don’t have to have a detailed plan for the whole book, you just need to know where you’re going and have a clear idea of the next chapter or two. As long as your planning stays a chapter or two ahead, you can get to the end of the book that way.

It occurred to me recently that this analogy makes two really key assumptions that aren’t necessarily the case. First, it assumes you know where you’re going (and that you care where you’re going and whether you get there). A sizeable minority of writers don’t work that way. Their writing “road trip” is more like driving around for a day or two and then looking at their surroundings and going “Hey, we’re close to Denver! Let’s go there.” And it works fine for them…but that brings me to the other key assumption, the one that really matters.

And that’s knowing where you are. If you’re trying to drive to Chicago, and you don’t know whether you’re starting in New York or San Francisco, you don’t know whether to head west or east. If you’re trying to drive to Chicago, and you’re starting in Honolulu or Beijing, you’re going to have a serious problem when you get to the Pacific Ocean. And if you don’t know where you are, you certainly aren’t going to be able to figure out what interesting places might be nearby to visit or even to finish off an open-ended road trip in.

Knowing where you are is something that’s so basic that most of us do it unconsciously, which is why the original analogy doesn’t usually address it, but only looks at where you’re going and how you get there. And most of the time, this works just fine. Every once in a while, though, someone I know gets stuck or runs into trouble because they’re doing the equivalent of trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a car, or driving east from Chicago in hopes of arriving in Los Angeles in a day or two.

Invariably, when this happens, it takes forever for the writer to sort out what the problem is. Once the person finally takes a look at where they are and what they’re doing, it’s usually a head-banging moment – “Dang! How did I not realize that I need a BOAT?” or “Geez, I’m in Pennsylvania, not Colorado! No wonder this doesn’t look much like the Rocky Mountains.”

What I mean by “where you are” in the writing sense is basic stuff, like what kind of story you’re actually telling, as opposed to the one you may think you’re telling (a friend recently got tied up for months because she was trying to write action-adventure, when the part she’d already written was clearly comedy-of-manners), who the protagonist and villain really are (they may be different from the ones you started off thinking they were), what the real problem is that the protagonist and friends are currently facing, and where facing their problems is likely to lead.

It’s not easy to do this, because it requires backing off from one’s preconceptions about what one has been doing and where one has been heading, and taking a long, hard look at where one actually is. And, sometimes, admitting that one is completely lost, and even the map is no help, because one can’t figure out where to go next to get back on track if one isn’t aware that one is in Pennsylvania and not Colorado.

Crit groups and editors and first readers can make a reasonably good analogy for asking directions at the local gas station, but one still has to listen – and also, one has to remember that the directions aren’t always totally correct. Still, it’s often a lot easier for someone else to see where a book is than it is for a writer to let go of what they thought they were doing…though one does need to remember to ask, and not everyone is good at that part.

It is a great pity that there isn’t a writing equivalent of a GPS system (preferably one that marks out all the road construction and missing bridges up ahead). Until someone invents such a thing, however, we all have to muddle through the hard way.

Everybody gets overstressed at some point, and the result can be quite dramatic in terms of productivity (and if it isn’t, you frequently end up paying for it later). There are a bazillion books out there on how to manage stress, and they all say the same things and they’re all right: exercise, eat right, take care of yourself, take a break, take a walk, meditate, talk to people about it, find ways to reduce it if possible (move, change jobs, change the locks on the house or the phone number, etc.), see a professional if it gets to be too much. The trouble is that they’re all long-term solutions, and we’re a quick-fix society…and most people don’t even start trying to deal with stress until they’re already in over their heads and sinking fast.

But it’s like writing: nobody else is going to make you write…and nobody else is going to take all the stress out of your life for you. You have to work at it yourself. Some of it you can get rid of permanently; some, the only thing you can do is to change your attitude. And sometimes, it’s a matter of remembering your priorities. Much as we all love it, writing a book is not the most important thing in the world. Not compared to, say, getting your kid to the emergency room when she’s fallen out of a tree and broken her arm, or taking care of your elderly mother who has dementia, or calling the plumber about the flood that’s happening in the basement right now. Sometimes it’s OK not to write for a while.

It can be hard to admit that there’s just no time for writing right now, especially when your backbrain is nagging you to Get This Story Down Immediately. You have to be honest with yourself about whether writing is part of your coping mechanism (in which case it may be worth it to make the time, because it will help reduce the stress) or whether it isn’t (in which case you need to not-write, or you will just make the stress worse).

On the other hand, if your frontbrain is what’s telling you that It Is Your Job/Duty To Do Revisions Today, or that You Cannot Waste This Valuable Writing Time Just Because You’re Stressed … tell it to go take a hike. You don’t have to write when your Mom is in the hospital or your kid is running a temperature or you’re worried sick about layoffs or the roof just blew off in a tornado. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.

Be warned that which hand you’re using may well change with the circumstances. Most of the time, writing is part of my coping mechanism, but when my mother was dying and just after, I lost a good six months or more of writing time because even the thought of dealing with the plot was the very last straw that I couldn’t cope with on top of dealing with the estate and everything else. And it took a while to realize that trying to make myself write “in order to cope” (which had always worked before) was the exact wrong thing this time.

People aren’t machines…and even machines need down time for repairs and maintenance.

Overbuilding an imaginary world is a problem that is closely related to over-researching. They have similar pitfalls both before and during the writing process: there’s the tendency to get so caught up in researching/inventing details that one keeps putting off the actual writing (in extreme cases, this results in the person abandoning writing altogether, and taking up worldbuilding/researching as a hobby); and then there’s the tendency to try to pack all of the research/invention into the story (also known as “but I can’t waste all that work!” and “I suffered for my art (doing all this research); now, Dear Reader, it’s your turn…”).

It is, of course, a truism that the writer knows more about the world, its history, and the background and backstory of the characters, than ever gets into the story. The thing that seldom comes up is the fact that when the writer knows it and how much the writer knows are things that vary from writer to writer and book to book. The most extreme examples at either end of the scale are those writers who sit down in front of a blank screen and make it all up as they go along, and those other writers like J.R.R. Tolkein, who spent somewhere between forty and sixty years developing the world of The Lord of the Rings.

In between are the rest of us, varying from one end of the scale to the other in terms of how much worldbuilding we need to do before, during, and after writing a story. Yes, after – it’s not unusual for a book to require more worldbuilding to resolve plot-and-consistency problems discovered during the rewrite, and it is exceedingly common to need more worldbuilding when one is writing more than one book using the same setting. I made up steam dragons, daybats, spectral bears, and swarming weasels for Thirteenth Child, but I didn’t nail down the entirety of the magical ecology of the Western plains and the Rocky Mountains. So there are a lot of new critters in Across the Great Barrier that I didn’t know existed until I needed to mention them, even though I’d already written an entire novel in that world. I still don’t really know anything about the magical ecology of South Columbia, Aphrika, Avrupa, etc. I know it’s there, and that it’s different from the ecology of the part of North Columbia I’m dealing with in the books,  but I don’t need to know the details unless and until they come up in the story.

On the other hand, I know way more about cinderdwellers and steam dragons and assorted other things than has made it into either of the books I’ve written so far (and it doesn’t look like getting into the new one, either). Some if it is written down; some isn’t. This pattern holds for everything, from the politics and history of my world(s), to cultures and customs, to things about the family: some of it is written out, some of it is still just in my head. I also do not require myself to stick strictly to every worldbuilding decision I’ve made – as my friend Lois says, “A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” There are always a few things that are non-negotiable, but most things, I’m not stuck with until I’ve used them in the story, and sometimes, not even then.

I work this way because it suits the way my imagination handles things. I require a basic framework for my background, but it can’t be too detailed. Without the basic framework, I go into choice paralysis – I could have any kind of setting, background, history, without limit, and my brain seizes up at the prospect. If the framework is too detailed, though – if I’ve made the mistake of trying to work out an entire imaginary encyclopedia of background – then I start feeling constrained and tied down. Too much detail, for me, makes it feel as if I were writing real-life mimetic fiction, without enough freedom to make up the stuff I want.

That closed-in feeling – the sense that you have to check every other noun against your encyclopedia to make sure you’re being consistent with all that background that isn’t even in the story – is the surest indication I know that the writer has produced more background in more detail than they really need in order to get on with the story. And that itchy point will be at a different level of background information for every writer. Some folks need a three-inch ring binder full of notes on everything from weather to favorite foods to different cultures; others get twitchy if they have more than a few key facts tied down before they start writing.

The trouble is that the itch doesn’t show up while you’re doing the advance worldbuilding; it only shows up once you start to write, and by then it’s almost too late. There are a few other signs of overbuilding a world; one of them is creating Tolkein-esque mountains of material that you find boring to read through. The whole point of writing down aspects of your worldbuilding, for a writer, is so you can write the book without forgetting key points or ending up with major inconsistencies. “Enough worldbuilding” equals “however much YOU need to have in order for the book to be coherent, believable, and consistent.” Whether your background notes are in the form of a glossary, an encyclopedia, a tiddlywiki, a single page of bullet points, or whatever – if they aren’t useful and accessible to you, while you are writing, there’s not much point in having them.

Doing a lot of worldbuilding in advance is not a requirement for writing a fantasy/SF novel. It’s one possible way of getting to the desired end, which is to have a believable portrayal of a world in one’s novel. Whichever way you work – doing it in advance, or making it up as you go – if the result isn’t coherent and consistent and believable without interrupting the story, you have a problem. Ultimately, the solution is yours to figure out, because your solution is going to have to work for your particular brain and writing process. It is, however, a good bet that if you have such a problem, the solution is unlikely to be “do more of whatever you were doing that got you into the problem.”

If what you are doing isn’t working, try something else.

Diagnosis is important, because different kinds of stuckness require different solutions. For instance, about 95% of the time when I get stuck, the reason is one of the following: 

a) an attack of insecurity (oh, god, I can’t write, what made me think I could, I don’t remember how to do this, this is all dreck, dreck, dreck…) Yes, published writers get these, too.

b) a failure to think things through.

c) an attack of sheer laziness (gee, what a gorgeous day; I wish I could go to the beach… oops! I’ve got writer’s block. I guess I will go to the beach…)

d) knowing the next bit is going to be hard for some reason – I’m going to need a new technique I’m not confident of using yet, or it’s a particular kind of scene I loathe writing but still need to have (transitions – we hatess them, preciousss, we hatess them forever)

When the problem is a), c), or especially d), the solution is to just sit down and do it anyway. So it’s dreck, so it’s a pretty day, so it’s a hard scene – tough. Write it anyway. I can fix it later, but I can’t fix it until I’ve written it.

When the problem is b),  just sitting down to write isn’t going to help unless I’ve done some of the thinking-through. (Some writers can do the thinking by writing it out, but I’m not one of them.)

And then there’s that other 5% of the time…

These are the times when I’m stuck because my backbrain is much smarter than I am. It knows that there is something dreadfully, seriously wrong with the story, or about to be wrong with it if I continue in the direction I’m going, and it digs its little feet in and absolutely refuses to move until I fix whatever-it-is. This kind of stuckness usually happens when I think I do know what happens next, at least to some extent. They leave town; they have a conference and decide X; they meet a new character who’s going to be terribly important to the rest of the story.

Trouble is, those particular characters wouldn’t leave town just yet; they’d actually decide to do Y, not X; the new character really doesn’t belong in this book. So I get stuck. I can slog my way a bit further, because I think I have some idea of what happens…I have a Plan. But when I do, the story gets harder and harder to write, and eventually bogs down for good until I go back to that spot and have them stay in town, decide to do Y, etc.

The last time I overrode my backbrain, I had to toss about 14 chapters and very nearly start the book over from scratch. I try really hard not to do this any more.

Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because “What happens next?” and “What do I do next?” are among the most useless questions most writers can ask themselves. They won’t help most people get unstuck, because getting the answer is getting unstuck, all at once.

It’s like having a car that’s well and truly stuck in a snowbank; if you rev the engine trying to go forward, the tires just sit there and spin. You have to try different things:  shovel out a little of the snow, sprinkle some sand in front of the tires, get one of those chain-link thingies to give some traction, rock the car forward and back until it gets up enough momentum to get over the hump and back out into the street, get some muscular friends to push…or, in extreme cases, call a tow truck.

But “what happens next?” is the most obvious question, so it’s the first one everybody seems to ask…just as the first thing you try when the car is stuck in the snow is to drive out and save yourself all the fiddling around with sand and shoveling and rocking and so on. The trick is to catch yourself doing it before you’ve spun the wheels long enough for the friction to turn the snow to glassy-smooth ice under and around them.

And there are a few writers who need the more general, as opposed to the more particular, questions. But it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re one of them, because if you are, you get stuck when the next question is particular, not when it’s general. Same principle, only done backwards.

So what do you ask instead? Well, I find that “why?” is nearly always useful. Why do they have to cross the river right here? Why hasn’t the villain done anything to stop them? Why can’t they just walk around it?

Also, Murphy’s Law is a writer’s best friend. (It’s a really frustrating best friend, because “Whatever can go wrong, will” applies as much to the writer’s plans as to the hero’s, but still…) “What can go wrong next?” is therefore almost always a really helpful question.

And if you really have no idea what happens next, it’s frequently useful to look at what all the off-stage characters are doing. The villain isn’t just going to be sitting around clipping Evil Coupons while he waits for the heroine to ride up and rescue the prince; he’s going to be trying to figure out how to stop her before she ever gets close. The sidekick who’s off delivering messages is going to run into other people and talk to them, which can result in anything from hearing useful rumors to having a beer with the villain’s minions while commiserating on their respective employers’ unreasonable demands to running into the heroine’s Aunt Margaret who insists that the sidekick deliver this hand-knit pink sweater to her niece right now. All of which can make for interesting conversation when the sidekick finally gets back and the heroine finds out about it. And so on.

One can also start at the Next Big Event and work backwards. If you know that the hero has to get hold of the magic sword before he can defeat the villain, what has to happen in order for him to get it? Defeat the dragon guardian? OK, what has to happen in order for him to do that? Fireproof armor? OK, where’s he going to get fireproof armor? And so on, until you get back to wherever he’s standing now.

And if one is desperate, there is always the old “have some pirates or ninjas or a guy with a revolver jump in through the window” trick, which works mainly because once this has happened, the writer has to come up with some sort of explanation for why these people have shown up and what they want. Between the action scene itself and the explanation, one can usually get at least a couple of chapters, and by then things are moving once more.

Of course, this stuff is only useful if the reason you’re stuck really is “I don’t know what happens next.” Sometimes, that’s not really the problem…but this post is too long already, so I’ll get to that later.