A number of years back, I was stuck in mid-story and complaining about it bitterly to a non-writer at a gathering meant for other purposes (i.e., it wasn’t a bunch of writers getting together to talk about the horrors of the literary life). He made a couple of intelligent suggestions, and I immediately began explaining all the reasons why they wouldn’t work, because writing was different and creative and …
“Stop,” he said.
I blinked at him.
“What is the next thing you have to do to move this story forward?” he said.
“Well, I need to know more about the magic, and I don’t know what the villain is doing while the heroes are having this discussion, and I have no idea how I’m going to get from here to–”
“Stop,” he said again. “Those are all things you don’t know and reasons why you can’t. I don’t care about that. What is the very next thing you have to do to move this forward?”
“Write another sentence,” I said sarcastically.
He took me seriously. “Can you write the next sentence with what you currently know about your characters and your plot and everything?”
“Yes,” I admitted grudgingly.
“Then do that.”
I allowed as how that was a reasonable next step, though I privately thought it didn’t really solve all the problems I was having. What was one sentence worth, when I had another 200 pages or more to write?
Really, though, I was grumpy about it because I knew the guy was absolutely dead right. Nobody writes 200 pages, bloop, like that. Nobody writes twenty pages at once. Every story that’s written gets written one sentence at a time (or if you want to be picky, one word or even one letter at a time).
That conversation has stuck with me for years because it highlighted a tendency that keeps cropping up in my work (and that I’ve seen other people fall into doing, too). When I get stuck, I immediately look for all the reasons I’m right to be stuck – all the things I don’t know yet, haven’t made up, can’t figure out, can’t just look up, don’t have time to do, haven’t got resources for, or am just sure I am really bad at. I always have trouble writing council scenes. I hate writing transitions, especially long ones. I don’t know how my characters are going to escape the city guards.
Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, none of those things have anything to do with what the very next sentence has to be.
What they do have to do with is my comfort zone. I planned for those characters to escape the city guards; in my head, that’s what’s supposed to happen. I need to know exactly how the magic works … by about three chapters from now. Whatever the villain is doing, it isn’t going to interrupt this scene. All those missing elements are things I need to know eventually, and since I realize that I’m going to need them sooner or later, I want to know them now, so that I can be sure I’m not heading in a wrong direction or down a dead-end plot-alley.
In short, I am used to having a safety net of knowledge about where my plot is going, what my characters are doing next, and what seemingly-random thing is going to show up to confuse matters. When I get stuck, it is easy to blame it on the missing bits, but experience tells me that the problem is more likely to be rooted in the things I think I know that just aren’t going to work out that way.
If I’ve been assuming that my characters are going to escape the city guards, I’m likely to get stuck when it begins to be clear that they are about to be hauled in for questioning instead. As long as I focus on how to make them escape and stick to my plan, I won’t get any further.
This is fundamentally different from the kind of pause that happens once I have accepted that they are getting caught by the guards, and suddenly realize that I have no idea how the guards in this city are organized or how they act when they catch somebody. How the guards work affects the next sentence, whether that sentence is “Halt!” or “You have the right to remain silent…” or “A broad-bladed knife with the distinctive red-and-blue markings of the city guard flashed past his shoulder.”
Over the years, I have come to realize that looking at all the things I don’t know (but need to figure out), can’t do well (but must get done), dislike doing (but will have to do), etc. gets in the way of more than just getting through the miserable middle. That focus on the negatives shows up during various stages of plotting – I don’t know why the belt is the McGuffin, or who founded the healer school, or what’s going on with the politics of electing a new archmage. But most of the time, I don’t need to know those things now; I just really want to, because if I know them now, in advance, I’m sure it’ll be easier to get everything down, make everything consistent, and connect everything up brilliantly.
Unfortunately, it never seems to work that way. I need enough knowledge to be getting on with, but “enough” always seems to end up being much less than I thought I needed. All that focusing on the missing bits did is delay getting the next sentence written.
This sounds familiar. Except that for me, the answer to “Can you write the next sentence?” is often “No.” Or “Yes, but doing so without figuring out the unsolved bits first is even harder than first figuring out those unsolved bits.” When the Muse/backbrain gets that insistent…
What I can do is gnaw at the problem. Or dig at it, like digging an escape tunnel with a rusty spoon. It’s annoying because it’s s-l-o-w. But it’s still an ordinary sort of hard, different from the initial “Plot is Hard” sort of hard that happens before I can even start writing a story. “Plot Is Hard” tends to be the sort of gridlock that can’t be broken even by slow gnawing.
And gnawing may give me the equivalent of “The characters get caught and questioned by the guards, but then manage to escape or are let go.” On the other hand, getting caught by the guards may put the story into a greased chute to “…and the characters are then tried, condemned, and hanged at dawn. END OF STORY.” In which case I really have to avoid them being caught, no matter what literary crimes I need to commit to make that happen.
I wrote the entirety of a novella, wracking my brain cell, trying to figure out why the MacGuffin was important. It was essential to the way the story unfolded, but I didn’t know what its purpose was. I kept plowing through, though, lamenting every paragraph that I needed to understand its function and that all would come to ruin if I didn’t figure it out.
Then I reached the end, and the problem solved itself when a character asked, “Are we ever going to know what that Thing One business was all about?” and a crew member replied that, no, they probably won’t.
I still don’t know—but it was a great relief to realize it doesn’t matter.
When I started out I would merrily write one sentence after another until the characters merrily plopped down and wouldn’t tell me what happened next.
Thus, I learned to outline. They still plopped down often enough but it was less frustrating and used less time.
“Write the next sentence” is indeed an excellent piece of advice — though it does run the danger of spending eight chapters faffing around on filler because the plot really can’t advance until one knows what the McGuffin is or is for.
I’m partway through a novella-ish thing wherein all I knew about the McGuffin was that it’s a ring and it’s in some way magical. In the process of wandering about with the main character, I’ve figured out the ring’s properties and I’m quite pleased with it — but the ring plot was never the main point of the story, the wandering about was.
I’ve also had the not-so-delightful experience of writing three-quarters of a novel without the least idea who the bad guy was or what his motives were, and granted that was the MC’s problem too, but constantly struggling to come up with something for him to do that didn’t involve getting a lead on that mystery — when that was the main point of the story — but also wasn’t obviously filler was a misery I’d rather not repeat.
For me it’s often the opposite: I can push along for a fair way (2-5K words) along a wrong path, until it all grinds to a halt, and stopping to figure out things (and sometimes, backtracking a little and continuing with slightly different information) is the way to go.
In laying out a complex novel, I’m currently in the throes of balancing what background elements I need to know in advance to keep from wasting a lot of time going down Green_Knight’s wrong paths, and which other elements (the vast majority) can wait until I get to the points in the story where they’re needed.
One habit I find useful to help keep me moving is that at any given point, I can keep myself entertained during downtime (taking walks, taking showers, waiting in a pickup line of cars for take-out food) by letting myself mull over things that are going to come up shortly — whether it’s lines of dialogue, or scene construction, or background details. That way I’m never bored, and at the same time I seldom have to come to a complete stop, since the planning process is always running a little ahead of where I am — like building a railroad by having a crew grading and smoothing the path before the folks with the rails and ties come up behind them.
Rick