Every writer knows the feeling of getting stuck. Whether a character isn’t cooperating, a scene doesn’t gel, or we’ve no idea how to get out of the corner we’ve plotted ourselves into – there are thousands of descriptions of “stuck”, and shelves filled with books offering advice on how to get unstuck.
Yet from conversations with other writers I’ve learned that “being stuck” is deeply individual, and that applies both to how we perceive that condition and the reasons for it. On top of that, a fairly simple, obvious reason for being stuck can get buried under an avalanche of personal history that bends and twists it so out of shape, it becomes unrecognisable.
I’m an intuitive writer. I write in spurts, then need to step back and let myself ponder the next part of the story before I can pour it onto the page. I’m also a “plantser” who has never yet found an outline I didn’t ignore. I write – at most – with pivot points, and I don’t write chronologically, either. I write key scenes, then fill in the blanks.
Getting stuck is very much part of my process, and part of me KNOWS that.
The rest of me, though? The greater part clings to teachings of “thou must write every day to be a writer” and cringes at accusations of laziness when I do “nothing” all day but read and maybe go for a walk. Then the guilt of wasting time and not pulling my weight steps in, and while my stress levels hit the roof, I’m even further away from getting things done.
It’s a vicious circle I should have eradicated decades ago, but writing alongside a job meant there was always a distraction to hand. A way to go and be “productive”, that hid the real issues.
Now that writing is my job, there are still tasks – social media, newsletters, website updates, accounts – I can hide behind when the stories don’t cooperate. I can also shift to another project when I get stuck and work on that to throttle the guilt.
Or I can work to get rid of the guilt altogether.
That’s the route I chose to go when I realised – in my pre-move decluttering – that I was dragging around a lot of crap from my past that has long outlived its usefulness – if it ever had any to begin with. Ditching nearly sixty years of accusations, slights, and learned responses, and unravelling the places where these have buried themselves deep into my beliefs is slow work. But it’s also enlightening.
Like realising that one of my biggest reasons for getting stuck is uncertainty. Which is a side effect of writing with pivot points.
For me, pivot points are like stepping stones from the beginning to the end of a story. Between those stepping stones, my characters change whether through self-realisation or a story event. And when I get stuck, the gap between two of those stones is simply too large for me to see all the way across, or the character change I expect to create is not proportionate to the gap I have.
All perfectly logical, right?
Not quite. Oh, once I’ve spotted the cause, it’s fairly easily fixed. The real problem is spotting the problem.
Most of the time, I have a vague feeling that something isn’t right. – Intuitive writer, remember? – Then the words stop coming, and guilt over not producing words kicks my stress levels through the roof and sends me scurrying to find a replacement activity to make myself feel productive and – most of all – not lazy.
When the best course of action to get me unstuck is to take a step back, relax in any way I can, and then bulletpoint everything that happens in that gap, all the way to the pivot point.
Nine times out of ten, I’ve jumped over an event, or omitted a detail or mindset shift. And pinpointing it gets the words flowing again.
It’s the guilt of being thought lazy that’s interfering in my writing process and is sending my productivity off track. And now I’m doubly determined to send it packing for good by training myself to recognise that vague restlessness that flags points of uncertainty and tackle them before guilt can stretch out its foggy tendrils.
We will see how it goes.
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