How to Get Your Stalled Story Unstuck
By: Margery Bayne
Tags: Short Story Writing, Writing, Overcoming Writers Block, Writers Block, The Short Of It

How to Get Your Stalled Story Unstuck

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

Sometimes when you are writing a short story you just get stuck. Sometimes this is partway through the first draft. Sometimes this is trying to get a second draft up to par. It’s not writer’s block per se, but it is something in the writing that just doesn’t feel right. Like pulling teeth. Or trudging through a swamp. Or just running face-first into a brick wall.

Have you ever had this happen to you?

If you have, I promise not all is lost for your story. Here are some hacks to consider to get your story unstuck.

Switch point of view

This hack comes in two flavors: switching the voice of your point of view or outright switching your point of view character.

To start with the first, if you are anything like me you tend to default to writing in a certain pov voice. For me, it’s third person. But maybe the story in question would be better served from a first person pov. Or visa versa. Or perhaps you want to go out of the box and try second person, or an epistolary style.

For this hack, just start your story over from the beginning in a different pov voice and see how it feels. Transcribing from one pov to another is more than just switching out pronouns and verb forms. First and third have very different feelings and effects (nevermind something like second person or epistolary) in the story. First person pov tends to be more in the character’s head and thus tells the story through their unique worldview. Third person pov — even a close, limited third person pov — , while it can be in the character’s head, has much more of a “camera” view of the story situation.

Onto the second flavor of switching point of view, sometimes you have selected the wrong point of view character and the story would work better if told from the perspective of someone else. This can be a character already in the story or perhaps a new one you create whole cloth.

Sometimes your pov character knows too much and it ruins the tension and flow of the story. Sometimes your pov character knows too little and it ruins the tension and flow of the story. While it seems natural to make the central character in the story the point of view character, there are some stories that can be better served by it being told via an outsider’s perspective on the main events. Think, The Great Gatsby is told via Nick’s point of view, not Gatsby’s. Think that all the Sherlock Holmes’ stories are told from Watson.

Backtrack

Your story may have come to a screeching halt before you took a wrong turn somewhere in the plot. You’ve written yourself into a corner. Or, more subtle, you’ve deflated the tension. While it may be possible to write yourself out of a corner or into more tension, sometimes the fix is in going backward.

Reread your story looking for the “fork in the road” so to speak that led you to the place where you are now stuck. Try writing the story in a different direction from that point.

How do you find that fork in the road where you went wrong? My tip: look for the place you killed the tension. There is a reason that it is a longstanding belief in television (known as “the Moonlighting curse”) that resolving the will-they-won’t-they romantic leads’ sexual tension will kill a show. Romantic tension isn’t the only kind of tension. There are hidden secrets and misunderstandings, mysteries to solve, villains to defeat. Was information revealed, revelations or declarations made, answers given, etcetera that left the story with nowhere to go? Stories are fine-tuned things, and the tension needs to build up through the climax, not be popped before it.

Mashup

Sometimes the reason a story is stuck goes down to its core. The concept itself is too weak, too flat, too surface-level, or too underdeveloped to carry a compelling story. And that lack can make it hard to write. There is just not enough heft to get the snowball rolling down the hill.

What does it take to resolve a weak concept? Does that mean giving up on your story as it stands? Well, kind of.

There is the slow burn option — put that story concept on the back burner of your brain so that it can grow and develop some before bringing it to the page.

Then there is the more immediate option — taking one story concept and smashing it together with another story concept. Seriously give two (or more!) of your half-formed story ideas life. A mash-up.

Take a concept from here, a character from over there, a setting from down yonder and stir them together so you have more than just a flat idea but rather a chemical reaction.

Another type of mash-up to consider giving your concept more life, mash it up with a different genre. Do you have a noir-style mystery? Set it on a space station and make it a sci-fi noir mystery. I was just reading about how Stacey Abrams (yes, that Stacey Abrams, because this woman can do everything) wrote her suspense novels as romances to make them more publishable (and succeeded at it). Genre-mixing or genre-bending is a sort of mashup that can a new angle or conventions to your concept to help punch it up.

Wrapping it up

End of the day, sometimes when you are stuck on a story you just need to give yourself a mental break. But there are some writing tricks to help you look at and consider your story from a different perspective that might end up livening up your tale and getting you unstuck.

Happy writing!