How to Get Unstuck in Writing

I’m a little stalled in my writing. This article provides some useful advice in getting through that dry spot before you finish your first draft. Where it may not help is during the editing/rewriting process.

I’ve tried a few of these, and they have helped out a little. Probably the best advice I could personally give is to find a time to write, and do nothing but write during that time. Write anything. Just write.

(James Patterson said that he just moves on to the next section when he gets stuck. Simply writes something like “To Be Determined” in the section he’s stuck on, and goes on to the next scene or chapter. )

2. Write the story out of order.

Chances are, twenty years ago, this would have been really difficult. I had a professor who realized, after he’d written his doctoral thesis, that things were in the wrong order, so he cut it up, a paragraph at a time, and took over the living room, placing different thoughts where he thought they needed to be realigned. He also told everyone not to open the front door.

Now? Whether you are a Word writer or a Scrivener writer, moving scenes around, or even whole chapters can just be one more step in the revision process. In the case of my most recent draft, I knew how the story ended. I wanted, so much, to wait to write those as a dessert for the work that I was doing, but I couldn’t move on. So, I wrote the last two chapters (it’s a dual narrative story). I made the theoretical tangible and it absolutely unlocked something within me. (I didn’t write THE END then. That’s a mental celebration that I knew wasn’t authentic yet.)

Source: How Writers can Breakthrough Being Stuck | Writers In The Storm