So, you’re stuck, huh? We’ve all been there. We all know that awful feeling when the ideas slow down and the story that once excited you suddenly feels boring and flat. It’s miserable to realize you’ve come to a place where you no longer want to write your book anymore – or that your book seems to no longer want to be written. It almost feels like your best friend is mad at you. Why aren’t they speaking to me? you ask yourself.  Why are they being so cold?

The thing is, most of the time when we experience this kind of severe writer’s block, it isn’t the result of a problem with your plan to move forward, but a problem with where you’ve already been. This is an extremely important thing to keep in mind in general: if you feel like something is wrong, you most likely will need to back up in order to fix the problem – often quite far. This is unfortunately at odds with a lot of the advice out there on beating writer’s block. How many times has someone told you that the answer is to “try taking your story in a different direction” or to finish the sentence, “But then suddenly, ______!” If you’ve ever taken this advice, you probably know it can get you even more stuck than you were to start out with. Case in point: I’ve got a draft of book 4 in a series that I’ve started writing, like, three times, and never made it past chapter eight, no matter how many “different directions” I tried to take it in. After re-writing the outline at least five times, I finally had the epiphany that the problem was all the way back in book 2. Book freakin’ 2! Like, 150,000 words ago!

So we’ve established that it’s often necessary to back up to find the thing that’s keeping you stuck, but… then what? What exactly are you supposed to be looking for, and how do you go about fixing it? Here are the places where I like to start when this happens, and a few strategies to make the un-blocking process less painful. A lot of this advice is geared toward first drafts, but will still be helpful anywhere in the revision process.

1. Re-examine your themes.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with going into a first draft without a ~big idea~ or any heavy thematic meaning behind your premise. Sometimes those big ideas don’t settle into place until later in the revision process. So as a general rule, you hereby have my full permission to wing it with your themes in the first draft. But if you’re really stuck, looking at the themes you’ve established (whether on purpose or not) can be a good starting place for identifying your problem.

If you don’t know off the top of your head what themes you’re aiming to hit, read back through whatever you’ve written so far and ask yourself if you see any recurring ideas or motifs – not just in what’s happening in the plot, but in the tone and the emotions of the characters, or the types of things you highlight in your worldbuilding. Pay the most attention to scenes you’re proud of or feel really good about, and look for common factors. Maybe there’s a big emphasis on family, or a recurring theme of characters coping with loss in different ways, or a moral message that underlies the decisions characters make and their consequences.

Once you’ve found that, now look for the opposite: points in your story that contradict, undermine, or subvert the themes and ideas you identified. For example, I sometimes have a problem with dodging darker themes on a first draft. I’m trying to immerse the story in bad vibes, and I’m just being too darn nice to my characters. My first drafts are usually riddled with places where the story didn’t go in the direction it should have because I didn’t lean hard enough into these ideas. This kind of thing can derail the intentions of your story to an extent that leaves it floundering later on, diluting the impact of setbacks that would normally drive conflict or growth, and leading to you, the author, getting stuck. Look for scenes that don’t match the overall tone, or decisions characters make that are inconsistent with the message the rest of the story is sending, and then examine what happened as a consequence of that.  See if any of these problem spots may have caused your story to change direction. Chances are that was a wrong turn, and you’ve gotta pull a U-ie.

2. Do a deep dive into your story structure and pacing.

I want to start by saying that you absolutely don’t need your story to line up perfectly with a “standard” plot structure like the hero’s journey, or contain exactly three acts, or anything like that for it to be good. But stuff like that has a time and a place, and that time is now. Try to line up what has happened so far with the beats of whatever story structure most closely matches what you’re doing. Can you identify an inciting incident, or a call to action? What are the big obstacles in the plot, and where do they fall? What are the major turning points in your character arcs – the revelations, changes of heart, darkest hours – and where are they? Make a map of where your story has already been without worrying too much about where it’s going to go. Remember, your problem is almost certainly not in your plan for moving forward – it’s something you already wrote.

When you look at this roadmap, this trail of breadcrumbs you just went back and picked up, do you see any problems? Is there more than one scene that functions like an inciting incident, are rising and falling action not balanced adequately, or did you perhaps resolve a conflict way too fast? (That last one, by the way, is something I’m very guilty of, and have learned to keep a careful eye out for.) Notice that a lot of these are pacing issues. They’re telling you that while your story might be headed in the right direction, the route it’s taking to get there isn’t quite working out. If you find you’ve established a pattern of conflicts and resolutions that’s too fast or too slow, see if you can find a way to create a more sustainable rhythm to your story by moving, cutting, adding, or combining scenes.

The other thing this sometimes exposes is the dreaded phenomenon of just… not having a plot at all. This is shockingly common and super depressing, because what kind of writer doesn’t even have a plot? A normal one, that’s what kind. I’ve never met a writer who hasn’t had this happen to them several times. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go back to the drawing board. If you had enough substance to your idea to start the book and write yourself into a corner, you can fix this.

And if this is a particular problem area for you, stay tuned – there will be a more in-depth post about story structure coming soon. For now, just know that if you’re sitting there in tears chanting at your computer screen, “It has to have a beginning, and a middle, and an end,” over and over while staring tearfully at the taunting blinking of your cursor, you’re a lot closer to identifying and fixing the problem than you think (and you’re in very good company).

3. Re-write your first chapter.

I know, I know, you don’t want to – first chapters are hard, and it’s a lot of work. But look, this is just an exercise, okay? You don’t even have to keep the new version. And I am not telling you to re-write the whole book. Let me explain.

You are writing a different story now than you were when you started this thing. This is especially true of first drafts. No matter how much you prepared and outlined and plotted ahead of time, I’ll bet you anything that you wouldn’t write the same first chapter now as you did back then. You’ve gotten to know these characters better as you’ve written them, often in very subtle ways. Maybe their voices have changed a little, or you’ve realized they’ll need slightly different traits in order to be the people who are supposed to be making this plot happen. Or maybe the plot has changed to suit the characters, and the stuff you were trying to foreshadow or set up in book one is no longer relevant. First drafts of first chapters are often littered with refuse like unused-but-sounded-really-cool-at-the-time worldbuilding details, minor side characters you left by the wayside, or conflicts you totally forgot were supposed to be A Thing because you got distracted by something else.

By re-writing this chapter from scratch and comparing it to what you had before, you’ll gain a clear view of where you made these unintended changes, and from there be able to make informed decisions based on what you already figured out about your themes and story structure about whether or not you want to keep these changes. This is going to be like cleaning out a closet in your childhood bedroom: you’re going to find a lot of super weird, maybe useless, possibly very cool stuff you forgot was there, especially if you got stuck toward the end of the book. You might be surprised by how helpful some of it is in un-sticking yourself.

4. Save the cuttings for re-planting later.

Sadly I don’t remember who told me to do this, but it ranks among the most helpful pieces of writerly advice anyone’s ever given me. I pass it on so that you, too can have your life changed by it.

Every book I ever write has a corresponding document floating around on my computer that contains The Cuttings. These are pieces of the story that got axed, but to which I was too emotionally attached to delete entirely. Sometimes it’s a line of dialogue that was out of character for the person who originally said it, but might suit somebody else later down the line. Sometimes I get ahead of myself and write a scene too early, and end up having to save it for later. One time I actually did the reverse, and wrote a scene that I later realized made more sense as a flashback taking place six months before the story starts.

Even if you think you might not use what you’re cutting, setting it aside for later rather than just obliterating it often makes the problem-solving process easier, particularly at those times when it involves hard truths about what really need to go. At worst, it’s a handy psychological trick you can play on yourself, and at best, it might end up saving your story a second time when you realize that scene you cut earlier fits perfectly in another spot. Remember, there was a reason this scene or this line was so hard to cut – you liked it! It was cool! Maybe it made you laugh when you wrote it, or took the story in a fresh, new direction you were really excited about at the time, or maybe it came to you in a dream and you just really feel like it’s supposed to be in there somewhere. Those reasons are all perfectly valid, so don’t trash your writing. Set that puzzle piece aside somewhere you can still reach it. It didn’t go there, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit somewhere.

Now, go unstick yourself! And happy writing.