171
54
The wise writer draws on
select weapons to keep his
story moving forward.
So you’re writing along and you get stuck. You don’t
know where to take the story or scene next. Maybe things
are just dragging. What do you do? One of these:
1. Turn to a random page in a dictionary or the-
saurus and select a word. Make a list of twenty
things that occur to you from that word. (See
“When you are stuck, call on a word and its cous-
ins.” on page 114).
2. Stop where you are, put in a marker of some
kind in your document (I use ***) so you can
fi nd your way back, and skip ahead and write
another scene.
3. When you get to the end of a scene and don’t
know where to go next, make two lists of at least
ten items each:
a. The first list is all the things you can
think of that readers would expect to hap-
pen next.
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172
b. The second list is all the things that could
happen that are not what readers would
expect. Write your new scenes based on
the second list.
4. Stop and do some research. Talk to an expert.
Read a book. Google some articles. Find a new
and interesting nugget and work it into the story.
5. Switch the point of view. Rewrite the scene in
fi rst person if you’re in third, or vice versa, and
see what happens.
6. Go backward to the point in the story where things
got slow or predictable and create a new path.
7. Start a new voice journal for the point-of-view
character and ask her some questions about
what’s going on. Let the character tell you what’s
happening and why things are stalling. Then
have the character come up with a solution.
8. Bring a new character into the scene. Make it a
startling entrance and fi gure out how to justify
it later.
9. Open a novel at random and fl ip pages until you
fi nd dialogue. Take the fi rst line of dialogue you
see and put it into the mouth of your point-of-
view character and start writing a scene from
there. Why did she just say that?
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173
10. If things get really bad, eat a Ding Dong and
lie down for half an hour. (You are allowed to
substitute for the Ding Dong.) When you get
up, write in longhand for fi ve minutes straight,
without stopping, even if it has nothing to do
with your story.
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