5 Ways to Fix a Stalled Scene in Your Novel

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

It’s a terrible feeling when the scene you’re working on grinds to a halt—and you have no idea how to get it moving again.

Imagine it—you’re in the middle of a writing session, your fingers are dancing over the keyboard, and suddenly…

They stop.

The words, your fingers, your understanding of what comes next in your novel.

Your scene has stalled and you don’t know why, and what’s worse, you have no idea what to do to fix it.

We’ve all been there, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a brand-new writer working on your first story or a professional author with fifty published novels. Sometimes, scenes just stall. Ideas poof out of your head and leave you hanging. Your characters stop talking to you, and the last thing they said was so out of the blue that you can’t fathom what they meant by it or what they plan to do.

Busta Scene: Getting Past Hard-to-Write Scenes

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Getting stuck in a scene can bring your whole writing session (and novel) to a screeching halt. Here are tips on how to move forward so you aren’t stuck forever.

The image of the writer who sits down at the keyboard and writes for hours on end is a nice picture, but writing doesn’t always work that way. Some days the writing flows fast and smooth, but there are just as many days when we struggle for every word. Most probably fall somewhere in between, with bursts of writing mixed with starts and stops as we figure out a scene or even a paragraph.

And then there are the scenes that slam on the creative brakes and crash our entire momentum.

Hard-to-write scenes happen to us all, but it doesn’t mean we’re blocked or that our story is doomed. It just means we’ve hit a snag for some reason.

The Perils of Not Knowing What Happens Next in Your Story

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Getting stuck in your writing doesn't mean you've got writer's block.

At some point, we all hit a wall in our writing. We get stuck, we don't know what happens next, maybe we know where we need to go, but not sure how to get there.

Hitting a wall can freak us out and make us panic, because it feels a lot like writer's block. We get stuck and fear the words won't come anymore, and struggle to get anything down, and nothing works. But most of the time, we're not blocked at all--it's just our subconscious telling us we're missing something we need to move forward.

Next time you hit a writing wall, take a deep breath, step back, and diagnose what the problem might be:

Don’t Know How to End Your Scene? Here’s Why.

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Last month, I had a Real Life Diagnostic question on not knowing how to end the scene. Coincidentally, a few days after that, I ran into the same problem with my own WIP. Luckily, I knew right away what that meant.

I didn’t really know what the goal of the scene was.

The nature of any scene is to illustrate some aspect of the story and move the plot to the next turning point. This is why scenes have goals—to drive the plot forward. Other things can and do happen in a scene, but at the core is that plot-driving goal and the struggle to achieve it (goal + conflict).

Making a Scene: Using Scriptwriting to Fix Problem Scenes

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

One of my least favorite writing snags is a scene that isn’t working and I don’t know why. I’d rather not have a clue what to write than know there’s a problem I can’t figure out how to fix. But I may have found a wacky way to look at a troublesome scene in a whole new light.

Turn it into a script.

Sounds weird, right? But I recently took a scene from Blue Fire and turned it into script format so a few local students could act it out at a Darkfall event. I’d never done a script before, and I learned some interesting things that will actually be quite helpful next time I’m stuck.