Getting Stuck

I’ve been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer’s block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, “How do you know what happens next?”

Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinion. 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.