I’m not stuck in any way on my current WIP (knock on wood!). Yesterday’s 1K words came out without much gnashing of teeth, but I’m noticing at #writegoal, the Twitter group where writers post their daily goals, some folks are struggling meeting word quotas and scene totals for a day of word work.
Here’s what works for me: Try something new.
Now, for you novelists in the crowd, that doesn’t mean to dive into that major novel idea knocking around in your brain (unless that works for you). Instead, give yourself permission to write away from the manuscript and get back to what we writers love most about writing:
Writing for the fun of it.
Pick something that won’t break your heart if you don’t finish. I tend toward personal essays that I keep in a file for easy reference in the future should I decide to go back and finish one. Don’t do anything bigger than, say, 8K words.
A few ideas:
personal memoir/essay
blog posts
journal entries (from you or a character)
a nonfiction article about something interesting to you or something from your story that you have knowledge of
a new short story (remember, 20 pages or less)
a letter to someone either fictional or real
The key here is to get your brain interacting with words and playing with prose in a way that gets your fingers doing all the work of lifting you from your rut. I am not joking when I say that this works, for me, almost 100% of the time when I feel stalled or reluctant in my WIP.
While I’m writing this new, no-pressure piece, I see parts of my current WIP jumping up in the back of my mind (sorta like Donkey jumping up at the swamp screaming “Pick Me! Pick Me! when Shrek was choosing a compadre for his trip to rescue Princess Fiona. But I digress…). I just jot my WIP tidbits on another piece of paper and go about my business until the urge to go back to the WIP gets too strong for the new piece to overcome. Sometimes it takes more than one short piece to do the trick, but it inevitably works.
I have made the mistake of starting a new, longer piece when doing this, and that’s a huge mistake IMHO. When I get in a rut with both pieces, which one do I come back to?
Even better, I’ve gotten some good, published material from these short jaunts away from the WIP. I’ve got a mighty collection of cooking memoirs started that might even make it into a book at some point.
The key to remember is simple: Writing got me into this mess, so writing will get me out of it.
What do you do when you’re stalled in your WIP to get yourself going again? Leave a comment or share at #writegoal over at Twitter.
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