When Writing Stalls

There cannot be a deeper feeling of helplessness than the one you feel when you know what you want to do, but are not able to do it.

Every time you sit down to write, you find yourself wondering what to do next.

Should you continue with the next chapter? Rework the one you’ve just finished? Move a section from the middle to the beginning? Perhaps you should revisit your original idea because something no longer feels right.

Hours later you realize you have been brooding about your book without adding a single word to it. Not frightfully effective.

When Every Decision Creates Another Question

The trouble often begins when you can see the individual pieces of your book but cannot yet see how they fit together.

You may have several excellent chapters, but do they build on one another? Does each chapter take the reader somewhere? Are you repeating an idea you’ve already explored? Is something important missing?

You sense that something isn’t working, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

So you keep writing, hoping the picture will become clearer. Or you keep revising what you’ve already written, hoping to find the answer there.

Neither approach helps. In fact, you may end up with more material to organise and more decisions to make.

Take Meera, for instance. She had written 40,000 words of her book but couldn’t decide how to organize her non-fiction work. Ideas overlapped until they sounded the same thing repeating over twenty pages. The worst part of it was, she wasn’t even sure where in the book those twenty pages would fit or how she should trim them down—if at all.

She was tearing her hair out, cursing the moment she had decided to write the book. Now she couldn’t let it go because, Oh, I have given three months of midnight oil to those forty thousand words! Nor did she know what to do next.

With Rohan, it was a work of fiction. He was in the same bind. Every new scene seemed to demand changes to the earlier chapters and he began rewriting the opening for the third time. When he finally stepped back and examined the story as a whole, he realised that his protagonist had no clear goal driving the plot. Once he resolved that, the climax sounded lame so he had to revise that. And changed the opening again!

I don’t know about you, but I find it mighty frustrating. It is worse for me because I not only have to navigate my own binds but help people out of theirs too. Not easy, I’ll have you know. I ought to have been a (benevolent) witch, with a fully functioning wand. Oh, the dream!

Know The Direction First

Your book is a journey.

You don’t need to know every turn in the road before you begin. You need an idea of your destination and the broad route that will get you there.

For a novel, that might mean understanding how your protagonist changes, what drives the central conflict and how the major events connect.

For a nonfiction book, it might mean identifying the central argument, deciding what readers need to understand first and working out how each chapter builds towards the conclusion.

The details can evolve as you write. Your understanding of the book may deepen. You may even discover a better direction.

But without a sense of the whole, it’s difficult to judge whether the chapter you’re writing moves the book forward or just circles back to the last one.

Three Questions to Help

When you feel stuck, resist the temptation to rewrite the last paragraph or start another chapter simply to feel productive.

Instead, ask yourself:

What is this book really about?

Not just its subject or plot, but the central idea that gives it purpose. What do you want readers to understand, experience or take away? The moral of the story for want of a better phrase.

Where am I in relation to that purpose?

Look at what you’ve written so far. What does it accomplish? What remains unexplored? Is the next section a natural progression, or are you writing it because you haven’t decided what else to do?

What is the most useful thing to work on next?

You may need to draft a new chapter. You may need to resolve a structural problem. Or you may need to step back and reconsider how two sections connect.

Step Back

If you cannot answer these questions, don’t assume you lack discipline or ability. You’re just too close to the manuscript to see it fully.

When you’re immersed in individual sentences, scenes and chapters, it’s easy to lose sight of the larger picture. An outside perspective can help you identify what’s working, what’s not and why. More importantly, it can help you see the choices available to you and decide which direction serves your book best.

You don’t need someone to make decisions. You need someone to understand enough of the work so they can become your sounding board. As they say about tossing a coin, what you wish for when the coin is in the air is what helps you make a decision, not how the coin lands.

So also, someone walking with you as you throw ideas out can help you crystallize what you want more than any suggestions they may have.

Before you know, you’ll come un-stalled.

Mother of three adult, opinionated humans and two boisterous dogs. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Author coach and developmental editor. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.