Ever sit there in front of a scene, kind of knowing what you want to/need to write, but not really? You’ve been on fire, the scenes piling up and the writing train is chugging with momentum. And then…
The dreaded Wall. Not writer’s block, exactly – no, this is more subtle and a little more insidious in the way it presents itself. It’s not a full-on draining of your creative juices, but rather a petering out into a clearing in the middle of the woods and you don’t really know how to find your way out of there. The fire is burning, and you want to keep writing, but you simply can’t see past the trees to the path that would lead to the next scene.
Many factors can land you in this no-man’s-land in the middle of the woods, feeling like you’re blocked from progressing the story even though your inspiration is still there.
I. You don’t know what’s really meant to happen in the next scene.
2. You don’t know how things are meant to happen in the next scene.
3. There’s a snag in the story, maybe a plot hole, or simply a problem whose solution eludes you.
4. A crucial piece is missing, and you don’t know what it is or where to find it.
One solution to this is to simply bypass the scene using the Mosaic Method, as outlined in this post. Skipping it entirely and continuing somewhere else can be the needed boost, but that’s not always as viable and useful as we’d like – especially near the end of the book.
I recently encountered this problem myself, in the last chapters of my fantasy sci-fi manuscript. I had the broad lines for the finale already drawn, and knew the main events that needed to be there, but I had this persistent feeling of something missing. I’d write a couple of pages more here and there, always dreading the moment I’d arrive at the point where I’d have to lay down that lost brick. The story was far enough that I didn’t really want to employ the mosaic method anymore, since I tend to avoid it at the very last meters: it can chop up the pace too much or emphasize the wrong things, and the result is even harder to patch together than a linear progress would have been. My rule of thumb is:
♠️ The closer I am to the end, the less I skip scenes.
One logical reason is that you simply have less material to come, which gives you less freedom to rearrange things, and it’s more likely you’ll find yourself spending too much time playing around with scene order and content instead of simply marching on to the crescendo.
Another reason is that I want to maintain the linear momentum in the writing itself, where each choice stands out perhaps more than something around the middle of the book – now everything is building up to the final reveals and largest conflicts of the story, and you don’t want any slow-downs or shuffling of feet when a quickening pace is required.
Ideally the finale should come together fairly organically if you’ve done your job with the preceding material, but it doesn’t mean you need to feel bad if you hit those walls. Especially if you’ve been writing into the dark, the individual pieces might need a bit more coaxing to emerge from the frothy fabric of the subconscious and slot onto the page.
My solution thus is to do exactly that: coax the missing pieces out of hiding.
How? By writing anyway.
”But I don’t know what to write, that’s the reason I’m blocked.”
Yeah, and that’s how you’re going to un-block the flow. The act of writing in itself is, like walking, the tool that teases out those knots and goes hunting around in the corners of the subconscious where the answers hide. Chances are that you didn’t have a hundred a-ha moments of brilliant plot development just to arrive at a finale that doesn’t know what it’s doing.
Once I realised this, I simply took out my notebook, sat in the sun, and continued from that scene where the crew is arriving at this mysterious place on a mysterious distant moon, and that’s all the spoilers you’re gonna get. I’d gotten half a page in when the answer hit me, and when I started working it out in my writing notes, the rest of the answers happily traipsed out behind it. Not only did I find a missing piece to an earlier scene (a how did that happen exactly? question), but I also found the Thing that tied together the thematics, character dynamics and conflicts I’d been developing for the whole book.
Through the act of writing itself, and not caring whether it would even be usable, I unlocked the answer. This is, however, somewhat different from simply ”stubbornly barging on and forcing it to work”, as many writers might feel their duty to be. That kind of forcing is going to do the opposite of coaxing anything out, because you’re bulldozing on with sloppy prose without really listening to where the story might be going. When writing through walls, I’ll not only approach the process like I was ready to solve a problem, without preconceived notions of where the scene is going to go, but also with the readiness of adding on elements that might surprise me and come out of nowhere. Nine times out of ten, those end up being the little details that make the story feel alive. And if I hadn’t hit upon the answer so fast, I might simply have turned my attention to another part of the manuscript, maybe browsed some notes and worldbuilding, anything to give the brain space to make connections.
It’s important to treat this as experimental ground: if you’re too married to the idea that what you now produce has to stay in the final work and has to be just right, you’re already stressing too much and in the wrong mindset for it to work.
- Write two, three, four versions of the same thing.
- Add some twist you’d never planned.
- Take an empty page and write whatever comes to mind.
- Write the very next scene you can think of – does that provide answers?
You might wonder: why did I bother writing this whole spiel if the solution was…just write?
Because the distinction in attitude may seem subtle, but it can change everything:
Two people can perform the same outward action but be experiencing two different worlds as they do so, depending on their mood, worldview, experiences, thoughts, inner dialogue, goals…You get the point. To develop the ability to non-forcefully write through walls, you need to learn to trust that those parts of the story are hidden there, waiting for the right moment. Then you simply step into the woods, pick a direction, and start walking. The accumulated story experience in your head will drive your feet to find the one final path eventually.
It’s interesting how, when you give yourself permission to meander, you end up finding the straight path anyway. Hopefully this gave you some ideas, and took off the pressure of facing the Wall.
Explorative writing,
x The Foxglove Scribe
The Foxglove Scribe 