When the Going Gets Tough
Strategies to Move Forward When the Writing Is Rough
In 1962, JFK famously said that we—Americans, I guess—don’t do things “because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
I don’t know about anybody else but I love doing things that are easier rather than harder. I’m in favor of the quick win and of the small item crossed off the to-do list. Not every achievement has to be going to the moon. Sometimes an achievement can be brushing your teeth.
People who choose to write an entire book are the astronauts among us. They could have chosen to go to the grocery store but, no, they chose to go to the moon. Personally I feel like writing short stories is a happy meeting. It’s like going to Nebraska. You still go somewhere but there’s no chance of burning up on reentry.
Today’s Shelf Life is going to be more like going to the grocery store than going to the moon. A short, sweet Shelf Life and then I’ll go to bed. Today’s Shelf Life is on some things I do when I come to a place in a manuscript where I’m not sure how to write through.
Let me explain what I mean. There are a lot of reasons one can get stuck while writing fiction. All of them are forms of writer’s block. A writer might get stuck because they don’t know where to go next, or because they run out of inspiration. Sometimes a writer might get stuck because they reach a part of the manuscript that is particularly tough for them or that they feel is beyond their skill to write.
This can happen to very skilled writers, not just amateurs like me. It happened to George RR Martin one time. For some writers, fight scenes are really hard. This is true for me because I have trouble picturing where things should be in space. For other writers, a part of the manuscript wherein several plotlines converge or many characters come together might be most challenging to write. In any case, you—the writer—come to this point in the manuscript and come to an abrupt stop: “I have no idea how to tackle this.”
People have all kinds of psychological reactions to the feeling of overwhelm. Personally, I get fatigued. My brain doesn’t feel like dealing with whatever’s going on and decides I should go to sleep instead. Other people experience anxiety, restlessness, distraction, or pessimism as responses to overwhelm. Any of these things can make it difficult to concentrate. When you can’t concentrate, it’s hard to write. Concentrating is like the whole activity.
So me, personally, I get sleepy. The more overwhelmed I feel, the sleepier I get. The sleepier I get, the harder it is to concentrate, the more overwhelmed I feel by whatever it is I need to write. Eventually there’s just nothing for me to do about it but take a nap until I feel less overwhelmed.
But while you’re napping you’re not writing and that’s no way to get text on the page so I have developed some coping strategies to get through, over, or around the tough parts of a manuscript without giving in to writer’s block. None of these is a true solution—they won’t tell you how to write the tough part—but I have found they can help diminish the sense of overwhelm so you can get back to pushing forward.
1. Skip Past the Tough Part
Got a tough thing to do? Have you tried just . . . not doing the tough thing? No, hear me out.
Hindsight is a terribly useful tool in all kinds of analysis. That’s why we say it’s 20/20. With the aid of hindsight, our vision is perfect.
Often, when I am writing, the current writing (that is whatever I’m writing at this moment) informs the past writing. Meaning, as I am writing, the things I write reveal opportunities to enrich and improve earlier parts of the writing. To give an example, I might write character dialogue that reveals something new about a character—something I’ve just now decided to make a part of their character. With the benefit of this hindsight, I can look back over all the prior writing about this character and see if I can add that dimension. Or if I add something new, I can go back and build in foreshadowing. This is the beauty of being the writer. I don’t have to know all the things in the order they appear in the story.
It’s possible to leverage that hindsight benefit on a challenging part of a manuscript by simply skipping it and writing past it. Events that take place after the part you skipped will prompt your brain to begin filling the blank space you left. If you skip ahead and then come back, you may find your brain has roughed in what was just a big question mark the last time you came to it.
So if I’m chugging along at a good pace and come to something that I don’t know how to write, there’s no reason for me to interrupt my flow state by letting myself be stuck. Instead I just write something like
And then there was a big fight.
The problem got resolved, somehow.
Then everyone went to the next location, I guess.
And I continue from there. Not knowing what to write next is not an excuse for me to lose momentum. Not when I can just skip ahead to the next easy thing. We can go to the moon later.
2. Go Do Something Else
When the going gets tough, the tough go do something else. This could be some other writing activity or it could be something completely different. It could be walking the dog. It could be rollerblading. It could be grocery shopping. It could be finally taking that package to the UPS drop-off point. The key is to do a different activity to focus your conscious mind on something else.
The subconscious part of the brain is the hardest working part of the body. It’s working on problems for you even when you’re not working on the problem. When I come to any kind of problem I don’t know how to solve, I pass the buck to my subconscious mind and let it work the problem for a bit.
My therapist sometimes says to me: Ignoring a problem never makes the problem go away. Well, tell that to the jury duty notice I threw in the garbage circa 1999. Sometimes ignoring a problem does make it go away. In this case, ignoring something with your conscious mind gives your subconscious a chance to work on it. I often find that turning away from a problem I don’t know how to solve for a while in favor of doing something else works a charm. When I turn back to the original problem, I might have a fresh perspective on it or a new solution to try.
When you’re cooking a complex meal and you move something to the backburner, the thing on the backburner is still cooking. It’s just cooking at a lower and slower rate, with less intervention from you, than the stuff currently on the front burner. Use your brain’s backburner. It’s an incredible tool.
3. Simplify
So . . . does the difficult thing need to be that difficult? If you’ve already tried coming back to it with hindsight and letting your subconscious work on it for a while and you still don’t know where to go with it—do you have to go anywhere with it?
The technique of allowing the difficult thing to happen “off page” and then writing the fallout of it has worked for a lot of writers. Stephenie Meyer famously built the Twilight Saga finale up to a super-powered vampire battle royale and then had everyone resolve things peaceably and go home. The typical wisdom is that the more important a scene is, the more likely it should occur on page; and, conversely, the less important the scene the more likely it’s okay to take place off page. That doesn’t mean you can never subvert the typical wisdom.
Ask yourself whether you might be able to tell the challenging part with less-complexity if you use a different character’s perspective, for instance. What’s the impact if the point-of-view character arrives late to the battle royale or even after the fighting is over. Ask whether all these plotlines need to converge here, or can some be held back to streamline. Ask whether every character is doing meaningful work in this part, or can some be omitted.
Sometimes just going through the thought exercise of figuring out how to write a simplified version can wiggle something loose in your brain and make the whole shebang feel less impossible.
Maybe you don’t have to go all the way to the moon. Maybe you can just climb Everest and call it a day.
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