This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 13: Seven Ways To Write Yourself Out Of A Corner.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner and I wanted to record today’s episode in response to a question I received from a listener named Caroline. But before I get to that, I would like to do two things: number one, I would like to thank Maggie for her absolutely beautiful and heartfelt handwritten letter. She recently received a fountain pen or perhaps purchased one, and just very graciously decided to write me a letter with it. So Maggie, thank you. I wrote you a letter back, which you should be receiving in the mail very soon.

Second, I received a very kind email from Write Now podcast listener and Patreon supporter, Gordon, who has written a very nice blog post about his own favorite writing tools, both analog and digital, from an app called Day One, all the way to the good old trusty typewriter, Gordon has listed out his favorite tools for writing.

I’m going to go ahead and link to that in today’s show notes. Gordon, thank you for sharing your insights with us. There was one other thing that I wanted to mention, and that is the fact that it has been more than my usual seven to 10 days between podcast episodes. Several of you know, either because you know me personally, or just because I’ve talked about this before, I tend to say yes to too many things. And I tend not to say yes to writing, enough. I have also been going through a lot lately with my parents’ health, my own depression, and just a number of other things too. So I’m not telling you this to necessarily make an excuse. I don’t want to tell you, “Oh, I was just … Oh, I was so busy I couldn’t podcast,” or “I was so exhausted by my own doing, because I do this to myself that I just … I didn’t have the energy to podcast last week.”

And while those may be true, I don’t want to use those as an excuse, but rather as a sort of just very honest depiction of the struggle that is work, life and writing balance. So I wanted to let you know that I don’t have it all figured out just yet. My good friend, Melissa once told me that you can never have it all. I’m a big fan of the show, 30 Rock, which stars Tina Fey, playing a character called Liz Lemon, who is a screenwriter for a TV show and also wants to be a mother and a good friend. And she essentially wants to have it all. That’s her big dream. Well, that’s my big dream too, but I’ve been wrestling recently with something that my good friend Melissa told me and that that is, perhaps that dream can’t come true or all of those things cannot happen at once.

That that balance can not be perfect just because we are limited creatures, limited by time and our circumstances, and that if I am looking to balance my full time job and my relationship with my family and my own creative writing and my podcast, very rarely will there be a day when all four of those are attended to in perfect measure. So one day I might have just a really awesome day at work. I have a really great client meeting or someone says, “Man, you really did a good job on the strategy for person X, Y, or Z.” And maybe I’ll also go home and write 750 words, but in doing so, I don’t have time to call my mother or spend time with my husband or to record a podcast. And say the next day, I record my podcast and I go to work and I have a good day at work, but again, family and creative writing suffer for it.

Or one day I just completely zone out at work, but then at home I call Mom, I get some writing done and I get my podcast outlined for the next day. So in a whole week, it’s possible to do everything and to do it well, or within a longer duration of time, say a month, within a month, I can write a satisfactory amount. I can record a satisfactory number of podcasts. I can have a really successful month at work and I can call my mother at least once a week. But when you break that time up into smaller and smaller chunks, it becomes more and more difficult to have it all. And I think that in the case of the last week or two, my podcast has gotten the short end of the stick because necessarily some family and work things have come up. But that’s okay because I am determined to have it all, just not all in the same day or even the same week.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you maintain a happy work, life, writing, skiing, yoga, zoo visiting, gardening, soup eating, marshmallow roasting, balance. If you would like to share that with me, you can send me an email at hello [at] sarahwerner [dot] com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Or you can simply visit my website of that same URL, navigate to the contact page and send me a handy little note through there. Alternately, you can leave a comment on today’s show notes for Episode 13.

So a while ago I recorded Episode eight, which was called How To Write When You Don’t Feel Like Writing. And I got a lot of interesting comments after that episode aired. And one that especially intrigued me was from a listener named Caroline. And I apologize if I am mispronouncing your name, but either way, thank you for your question, which was, “Sometimes I fall into a literary sort of ditch, a plot hole, and I just can’t fix it. This is one of the main reasons I don’t feel like writing. I try walking, but it just doesn’t help me out of that hole. How can I get out of this plot hole?”

Caroline, that is an excellent question. And it’s certainly one that I have struggled with and I’m sure that many other listeners have struggled with, which is why I wanted to turn it into its own episode. I think that no matter what we prefer to write, all of us have been in that place where we’re wrestling with a scene that just doesn’t work. Or we realize that we’ve sort of constructed a cage that we can’t get out of, whether of logic or possibility or circumstance within our writing. And you simply don’t know what to do next. Or you may note that your characters are lacking motivation and that something you’ve written doesn’t necessarily work with what they would do.

Or maybe you realize that you’ve built your novel on an idea instead of a story, and you don’t know how to progress. Or perhaps you’ve been following your outline like a good writer, when you realize that your outline sucks. Or maybe it doesn’t suck, maybe it just takes a wrong turn and you don’t know how to right that wrong turn. So I have come up with seven different ways to sort of get yourself out of the corner that you’ve painted yourself into, or the corner that you’ve written yourself into. Hopefully one of them will work for you, or perhaps several of them will work for you in a certain order. In any case, in that situation, when you are sitting back at your desk and you’ve thrown your head back, and you’re looking up at the ceiling, perhaps pulling at your hair or rubbing your forehead or your temples, or maybe you’ve taken off your glasses and are just rubbing your eyes, realizing that you perhaps have made a giant mistake.

There’s something that I want you to do before you even start one of the seven solutions that I’m going to talk about. I want you to think hard and evaluate the problem. And what I mean by that is, I want you to look at it and discern whether you’re just having one of those days where everything you write sounds terrible even if it’s … on a later day, even if you read it and it’s good, or if this is a realization that has been building slowly; if it is an actual and legitimate problem that perhaps you’ve been simply choosing to ignore up until now. If you know in your heart that you’ve written yourself into a corner, rather than you just decided that day that you hate everything you’ve written, because that happens to me all the time and it happens to a lot of writers all the time.

So before you take any drastic measures, evaluate. Make sure that you have actually written yourself into a corner and then take one of these seven steps or maybe take all the steps if you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do. So there are a lot of things you can do when you realize you have written yourself into a corner. One of those things you could do is quit. It’s very easy to quit. It’s very easy to close your laptop or crumple up all your paper and storm into the kitchen and pour yourself a coffee or something stronger. And to say “To heck with this, I’m done. Why do I torment myself every day? I suck and I’m never going to get better. Why bother?” Okay, that is not one of the seven steps, please do not do that. Do not quit.

You have put your time and your energy and your personality and your soul and depending on how you write, maybe your blood, sweat, and tears, I don’t judge, into creating this work. Remember that you were driven to create this work in the first place. This is your story to tell, and you need to do that. So don’t quit.

Another popular method of dealing with having written yourself into a corner, and again, this is not one of the seven solutions, is to start completely over from scratch. I have done this before. Nothing good comes of it. Because while in your rewrites, you might fix a couple of issues, it’s a huge waste of time because you’re simply rewriting what you’ve already written. Rewriting gives you the illusion of production without having you actually produce anything new. Rehashing what you’ve already written in a new form, even if you’re changing some things along the way, will not help you grow as a writer, because essentially what you’re doing is backing away from a challenge and busying yourself with busy work and your time is worth so much more than that.

Your potential needs you to use it and to not ignore or squander it. And often when you rewrite, you end up right back at the same roadblock or in the same corner that you started with, only now you’ve invested another three months in your novel or your work, whatever you’re writing, and all you have is a slightly edited version of the original. So do not be tempted to quit and do not be tempted to rewrite what you’ve already written. “Well, jeez, Sarah,” you might be saying, “that’s how I deal with this stuff. What am I supposed to do?” If those are routes that you’ve taken before, I’m certainly not blaming you or saying like, “Oh, you’re such a jerk for doing that,” because I have done both of those. I have just realized that they are neither the best nor the most productive solution if you want to grow as a writer. I’ve learned that the hard way. I’ve wasted a lot of my own time.

So if you’ve realized that you’re not just having an, “I hate everything I’ve ever written” kind of day, and you actually have a problem that you need to fix, I present to you seven ideas for writing yourself out of a corner.

Number one: remember a time in your work, whether it’s a short story or a poem or a novel or a biography, or what have you, remember a place in your work where you didn’t feel lost, where you still felt confident, where you still felt like you were writing something really awesome, where you hadn’t yet written yourself into that corner. This can be hard to do, but go through and really think about it, read through your draft and find that wrong turn. Find the beginning of that scene that just doesn’t work or find the decision that one character made that just really didn’t make much sense.

Find that place that you got stuck and you just kind of made up something and went with it. And then later after 100 or 1,000 or 5,000 words, you realized it was the wrong thing to do. Go back to that place in your draft and mark it. Use a little row of asterisks or color coding, or simply draw a line, whatever method you use to write. Make it very clear that there is a point. What you need to do next is starting from that point, that wrong turn that you’ve taken, if you’re in a word document or some kind of computerized writing system, writing program, writing platform, highlight that wrong turn. Highlight all of the words from that mark you made, until either the end of your work or wherever things start just working nicely again. It might be a section in the middle of your work, or it might just be one point in your novel that extends through the entire rest of the novel.

If you are writing by hand, then just gauge where that section begins and ends. Again, it might end at the end of your work. And what I’m about to tell you to do with this wrong section of your work is going to sound very drastic and very painful. What I’m going to tell you to do is delete this, or if it’s on paper, draw a line through it or cut the paper and crumple it up and get rid of it. This is drastic, but sometimes it’s necessary. If you have a lot of necrotic tissue in your arm, the doctor is going to tell you that the arm needs to come off to save the rest of you. Once you do it, I think that you’ll find you feel lighter and healthier, perhaps relieved. It will hurt at first, but then you’ll realize your novel can now begin to heal and hopefully regenerate a new arm.

Now, I know how it feels to be told that you have to delete a significant chunk of your work that you have probably worked extremely hard on. I know, and there is a slightly less painful way to do this. And that is to create a document, so either an electronic document on your computer or a new sheet of paper in your typewriter, or just a manila folder if you’re handwriting. And label that folder or that file, or that document, Leftovers. And instead of deleting that arm that is about to poison the rest of your body, instead of deleting it, simply cut it from your novel document and paste it into the leftovers document. Or again, if you’re handwriting, simply take those pages and tuck them into a manila folder, labeled Leftovers. That way you are not completely getting rid of them, but you are still excising them from your novel.

And if you want to, you can look back on them from time to time and remember that they’re there, or perhaps even use some of that material at a later date in a different or more appropriate section of your work. Either way, it’s out of your novel and you are free to move on. Now, in order to do this, whether you fully delete that section or kill your babies as Stephen King says, or you simply compile them into a leftovers file or folder, the crux of the matter is that you can’t be unwilling to change. I know what you’ve written is probably very good and it’s simply not a good fit for that particular scene in your work, or it’s not the right sentence for your poem. You can’t get too attached to that configuration of words in that specific place in your work. You must be willing to change and grow as your novel changes and grows, as your poem changes and grows, as your essay, you’ve got it, changes and grows.

You are an artist. And part of what that means is discovering yourself through your work and figuring out who you are and what that means through creative expression. And sometimes you’re going to take a wrong step and that’s okay. It’s all part of the growing process. No one is ever going to write a novel from start to finish and have every word be perfect from the get go. So don’t be too hard on yourself.

All right, the next couple steps will work whether you’ve decided to take that first step or not. So whether you’ve sort of cut off that arm full of necrotic tissue, and now you’re back at the shoulder stump, wondering what to do next or what to do now that you have the chance to make things right, or whether you’ve decided to leave the arm there and want to do some experimental surgery on it, or you want to try painting the fingernails on the hand to see if it looks less dead, that was a weird metaphor, sorry, but either way, number two, you have the option to do something completely weird.

So wherever you decide to start writing, start writing and let yourself be freer than you ever have been before. Do not let your outline or any preconceived notions of what this novel should be or ought to be, get in the way of being experimental. So your character who has moped around in their room for the first three chapters of their novel, pacing back and forth, they wake up the next morning with a gun in their hand and blood everywhere and they have to deal with that. This is an extreme circumstance. So give your characters an extreme circumstance. You might not keep what you’ve written, but it might help you write to a new place, a better place.

This is an exercise I like to do when I’m stuck in a corner. I say, “All right, I’ve written myself into this corner. I can’t think of a way to get out. All right, I’ll create an insane way to get out and just see where that takes me. I’ve realized that my character is locked in an iron cell and there are absolutely no people who would even think to look for her. What do I do? What is the craziest thing that can happen? I have some kind of more common options like, Oh, she discovers she has some kind of superpower, or she is visited by the ghost of her dead mother who helps her out. Or she takes another look at the iron room and sees some rust and can kick through it, or lightning strikes and kills her, or I mean, just something weird.” We have the gift of weirdness. We have this special gift that lets us think in ways that other people can’t. So use that to your advantage. And at the end of the day, if you still feel like you’re in a corner, go back to step one.

Number three: revisit your outline. One of the worst things that you can do as a writer is to let your own ideas limit you. So perhaps what you need to do is revisit your outline and say, “I’m trying to force the story to go in this direction so that lines up with my outline, but boy, the way I’ve built this character organically through the story, I realized I’ve painted myself into a corner here because I’m trying to get this character to do something that is not in the nature I have created for him or her. My outline says that this needs to happen, but boy, my character just would not, at this point, would not do that. And by making this character do that, it makes the novel wrong, or it ruins this scene.” So you might need to revisit your outline and either be willing to change it or perhaps cut it.

Number four: reread your work. A nice big chunk of it, up until the part where you realize things have started to go wrong or that you’ve started to write yourself into that corner or you’ve started to feel lost. Read up to that point with a special focus on your character’s actions and motivations and their logic. So what I’m asking you to do is to empathize very deeply with your characters or as we sometimes say, step into that character’s shoes. Re-examine very closely who they are and trace their actions back to their motivations. Ask yourself, would this character actually have done this every step of the way? And if you find at some point that your characters have done things outside of their character, go back and rewrite things so that they are based on what the character would do and not what you want them to do. And then write from the point of view, from the shoes, of each character.

Number five: sleep on it. I’m going to be honest, sometimes you can get burned out while you’re writing. And sometimes you’ll try the different methods that I’ve mentioned before, and you’ll just be like, “Sarah, this is not working for me. I can’t make this work. I’m so frustrated. I want to cry.” So what you do is you get in bed. If it’s the middle of the day, set an alarm so you don’t sleep for more than a half hour, and sleep on it. It’s like when you’re in high school and you’re studying for a test and you just literally cannot cram any more information into your brain. And so you go to sleep and when you wake up, everything is clearer and better. And you can think in fresh paths.

Take a nap, go to bed early, or just go to bed period. When you wake up, do your morning ritual, have a cup of coffee, tea, whatever it is, and face your problem in your work with a fresh mind. Trust me, it will help. This is different from quitting because you have the intention to come back to it the very next day. You don’t just tuck it in a drawer and say, “Someday I’ll work on it.” And then you sleep for six months. Do not hibernate. You are not a bear. You are a writer and you need to write every day.

Number six: meditate. If you’re not at your very last wit’s end and the only solution is to sleep, then I suggest a short period of meditation. Now I’m not saying you need to climb a mountain and kind of sit in the lotus position and go “OM” until you are hit by lightning or inspiration or some mixture of the two. What I’m saying is allow yourself the time and space to think. And believe it or not, writing is not 100% just acting and producing all the time. Writing is also thinking, so turn off your computer screen or close your notebook or your journal, turn off your phone. And you can either set a timer or give yourself a little bit more freedom depending on your schedule and how things work best for you. I need to set a timer or I will simply wander the day away, and think about how you think best.

So go for a walk, go for a drive, sit in your living room on the couch and put your feet flat on the floor. Sit up straight and close your eyes and quiet your mind. Or maybe make a cup of tea and sit in your backyard or on your deck and just breathe for a while. Or if you are anything like me, full disclosure, I get all of my best ideas in the shower. So maybe heat up the shower, shampoo your hair a couple times and just let your mind wander.

Another great way that I think is doodling. I am by no means an artist, but that’s really the beauty of doodling, is you don’t have to be any good at drawing. I just get a little sketch pad and a pencil, a little scrap of paper and a pen. And I either let my mind wander or I focus on the problem that my novel is having. And I doodle while I think, and it really facilitates a more clear and open thinking. When I doodle, I doodle squares and cross hatchings and such, and I know there’s supposed to be some kind of personality thing where, “Oh, if you doodle squares, then you’re this kind of person. And if you do circles, you’re this kind of person.” Don’t worry about what kind of person your doodling might indicate that you are, just do it and think and I hope some ideas come to you.

Finally, number seven: ask for help. This is probably the one that I have the most trouble with because I’m terrible at asking for help. And I don’t necessarily mean go up to somebody and be like, “Hey, this is happening in my story. And I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.” Instead, maybe agree to let a friend, or if you have a writer’s group, a member of the writer’s group that you trust, or a stranger, you could probably find a stranger online who would give you an honest opinion, have them read it and see if they notice the same thing, if they notice that you’ve written yourself into a corner. And figure out from their point of view where it begins, and ask them, “Do you see where this has gone wrong? Do you have any ideas on what I might begin to do to fix it, or what has caused it?”

Don’t expect them to solve the problem for you, but rather listen to what they have to say and evaluate whether or not it will help you. And you can ask one person, you can ask 20 people. If you are in a class or a writers group, that is an awesome place to take your work for honest feedback, but just like when reevaluating your work or your outline, just as you need to be willing to change to do those things, for this one, you have to be willing to listen and accept criticism of your work. That’s hard. It sucks. You’ve created this awesome thing, and it’s really easy to get defensive when someone is apparently tearing it down. So commit to yourself that you will listen with open ears and an open heart.

And while you don’t necessarily need to take their advice, in fact, I would caution you to evaluate anybody else’s advice very carefully, leave room in your mind to question whether “Hey, this might actually be a good idea” or “Hey, they’re right, my novel really does start to tank right about here.” Constructive criticism can be hard to take, but it can also be a very good friend.

So there you have seven things that you can do to help write yourself out of a corner, whether you are stuck with a scene that doesn’t work or a character who is acting against their personality or their own logic, or whether you are trying to force the story in a direction that is not natural for the story. Let me know if these help you, or if there are methods that I haven’t talked about today that you use to write yourself back out of that corner, I would love to hear from you.

This week’s book of the week is called the Girl With All The Gifts, by M. R. Carey. And it’s one of those books where it is somewhat difficult to talk about without giving away any of the lovely surprises, but I will do my best.

The book begins with a little girl who is apparently shut into some sort of facility and treated in a very surprisingly brutal way. However, there is a reason that she is being treated like this, and sort of unraveling the mystery of what she is and how the world that she’s in, came to be the way that it is, is just very gripping and interesting. The writing is very close and intense and personal. And the point of view often switches between character to character, to character in sort of that Game of Thrones way, even though the characters do stay together for the majority of the time. It lets you see different perspectives of each character, which in a novel this intense and deeply human, is very important and rewarding. The Girl With All The Gifts, is at its core, a survival story. And while it is talking about the survival of a race, it is really beautifully rendered from the point of view of a very limited number of people, which I think heightens the reader’s emotional involvement.

It is very cinematic and also very, very gory. There is a lot of violence in this book. If that is not your thing, please stay away from this book because it will probably make you sick. I didn’t go through and count the number of times the word blood was used, but it was probably a lot. But still despite the sort of silly labeling or the easily dismissed label that horrifying books and movies end up with, this is not a trivial work. It’s really interesting and lovely and very well executed, pun definitely intended.

As this episode draws to a close, I would like to thank my Patreon supporters, including Sean Locke, for their generosity; you guys help make this possible. You help cover my costs for hosting and my microphone and just everything else. So thank you so much. Thank you also to Caroline for today’s question/entire podcast topic.

Thank you also to those of you who have signed up for my email mailing list, you are very awesome and I appreciate it. If you would like to stay in touch with me between episodes, because sometimes there’s a little bit of a lull between episodes, I do like to send out emails and such between episodes if I can, just to let you know that I’m not dead and that my podcast is not dead, and sometimes it can also help affirm that you are not dead, which you’re not. If you want to sign up for my mailing list, you can do so on my website, sarahwerner.com.

And until next time, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and you are a writer.