Writing When You Don’t Know What Comes Next
Fellow writers, we’ve all been here, yeah? You’re in the middle of a piece. You were fast out of the gates starting it off: you’ve established the hook or got the characters yelling at each other or provoked your reader’s curiosity. You’re cruising along.
And then… pppht.
The car runs out of gas.
And you’re left staring at the last sentence your wrote and wondering: what happens next?
Sometimes, you know your starting point (where you left off) and your destination (the next major scene or idea), but you have no idea how to take the story from one to the other. You wish you could just jump-cut ahead.
Other times, you may know what happens further into the plot — like, several chapters down the line — but you have no idea what happens in between, only that, well, stuff has to.
Still other times, you’ve put all your energy into your set-up, detailing mysteries or tension without the slightest clue how you’re going to resolve them.
It happens with non-fiction and non-creative writing too. That time when you have all your research, but you don’t know how you want to wrangle it into your essay. When you know what you need to tell someone in an email but every phrase you start to type out seems stilted and ugly. When you start a personal blog and realize halfway through a draft entry that you’re just saying the same thing over and over because your brain hasn’t figured out how you want to develop the idea.
In all of those scenarios, writing turns from a joy into a slog. You feel the distaste in the pit of your stomach. And there’s only three things you can do.
1. Abandon the piece.
Deciding to do this is really tough.
It’s tough because it’s the choice most writers make when they’re just starting out: when you’re writing for the love of it, and suddenly it stops being fun, it doesn’t make sense to continue. And, a lot of the time, when you don’t have much experience with your own writing process, you can’t tell the difference between an idea that contains the kernel solid story or article in it and an idea that maxes out at a fun-to-write scene or two.
(Solid or fun-to-write for you personally, that is: I could never develop a premise like “a girl gets adopted by a farm couple and turns their lives upside-down with her creative spirit” into a short story, let alone a novel, let alone a series, but L. M. Montgomery could and did.)
So, even after you get to know yourself and your writing habits, there’s always that nagging fear: if I just worked harder, could I make this story work? Am I going back to my old bad writing habits, the ones I had before I knew how to shoulder through the challenging parts? Am I really going to waste all that effort I put into what I have now?
Or, of course: if I let go of this story/essay/chapter, does it mean I’m not a real writer?
Sometimes, moving on to work on something else is the right call. Other times, a little more elbow grease/self-torment will pull me through. Still other times, the problem lies in that wrong turn I took at Albequerque chapters and chapters ago, and the only solution is to pull up everything since then by the roots. Each project is different, and I’m different, too, with everything I work on.
2. Wait.
This used to be my go-to strategy when I was working on what would become my first completed novel-length MS. Don’t know what happens next? Wait. Inspiration will strike.
As I got older and gained more experience, I forced myself to make inspiration work for me. I didn’t know how to connect this scene to the one that had to come after? Well, then, I’d try out the only thing I could think of right now and worry about the rest in revision. Real writers write like it’s their job, dammit, and if I could crank out school papers when I was feeling uninspired, then I could darn well push forward with the things I actually cared about.
Now that I am even older, I recognize that there’s a balance to be struck between the two extremes. Sure, if I wrote only when I felt like it, I’d never get anything on the page. There’s too much stressful day-to-day stuff, like grocery shopping and taking out the garbage and grading papers. I lack the luxury of extended downtime.
But if I never wait to get perspective on the story, sometimes I miss the opportunity to strike out in a whole new direction. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been banging my head against a plot problem all day, only to have a potential solution pop into my head when I’m off at the gym or hanging out with friends or catching a show: when I stop trying to force it.
C’mon, it’s science.
3. Write garbage.
Like I blogged about a couple weeks ago, sometimes you just need to let yourself make mistakes.
In the case of writer’s block, sometimes it’s about being afraid to put down something imperfect. It’s allowing a temporary roadblock to turn you back home instead of accepting that for now, for today, you’ll find an alternative route around and keep going.
When I can’t think of the exact right thing for a character to say or the thoughts that might motivate her to move on to the next plot point I know she hits, I’m tempted to quit. Whatever I try to write will be terrible; what’s the point of slinging random words at the page?
Well, a lot of writing is about momentum (at least for me). I very quickly learned that no matter how enthusiastic I am when I save and close my file at the end of the night, the next morning promises a slow start. Likewise, once I get my fingers going over the keyboard, I rarely have to stop, and if I do, it means I’m well and truly stuck.
To start and keep momentum, I have to quiet the fear that I’m going to trip. My inner perfectionist screams, “We can’t start walking until we know for sure we aren’t going to fall”–but if I listen to it, there’s no way I can run.
So I trust myself. Or, at least, I trust my future self: even if clumsy present-me stumbles, Future Sarah will put in the time and effort to pick us back up and reroute our path.
And if that means clunky sentences and awkward plot beats and whole pages of draggy exposition, just for now, then so be it.