You’ve got this great story idea and you’ve been going along, with everything falling into place. You are in the zone and you know, just know that you are going to power through this story and get it to market fast.

Then suddenly you find you’ve written yourself into a corner. You’re stuck. There is no way out. Your perfect story has become your perfect nightmare. What can you do?

Don’t Panic

First of all, don’t panic. Before you decide to toss the whole thing out, start from scratch, or walk away from it altogether, let’s see if some of the following can shake things loose and get you back on track:

Questions to ask yourself

Have I forced my will upon the characters?

You may be in that corner because you are forcing a character to follow a path that just doesn’t work for them now. It may be that you decided this during the outlining stage, but now that the story is playing itself out, it just isn’t working. The easy solution is to adjust and correct course. If this is the case, further questions you can ask yourself would be, ‘Is this the way the character would naturally respond to the situation?’ ‘Is there an unexpected way I could have the character respond while still keeping it consistent with their personality and needs and desires?’

Do I need to add a character, location, subplot?

If the problem isn’t with your main character, perhaps you have a missing element. Review your story to see if adding a character, an additional location and/or subplot fixes the problem. Perhaps you’re having your cast of characters working on too narrow a field, or you’re holding them captive in one location when they should be out and about in the world, or even that one of your supporting characters should actually be two different characters.

Have I failed to set up scenes so that they make sense?

Another area to consider is structure. Are your scenes set up properly? Are you making assumptions that your reader will know something that you actually haven’t added to the story. Do you need to provide more details of setting, location, mechanics of a particular activity?

Is the scene, character, subplot necessary?

This can be hard because we often don’t like to cut out scenes, elements or characters that we especially like. But your story has come to a halt for a reason, so cutting that extra scene about ice cream fetishes or even that cool but unnecessary character, though painful, may get the story back on track.

If it is none of the above, check all the basics including:

1. When was the last time the story flowed?

2. When did the story stop flowing? What happened just before that?

3. Is there too much conflict?

4. Is there not enough conflict?

And when all else fails, ask yourself this: 'Can I skip this part and come back to it later?' Sometimes, we get stuck on one scene not going well and can’t seem to move on. But if you just make a note to resolve it later, you may be able to just get back to your story. And when you come back to that troublesome scene, you will discover that it wasn’t needed, wasn’t that troublesome after all, or you just needed some distance from it to get to the solution.