Skip to Content

Writers on Writing

Getting Unstuck

Photo of Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt

Getting Unstuck

If you’re a writer, you know the routine. You’re halfway in the middle of your novel or story and suddenly you feel stuck. You can’t move forward. You have no idea why the plot isn’t thickening, but instead seems stuck in concrete. Recently, I hit one of those dead ends in the novel I’m writing now, but because I had some techniques—my personal lifesavers—the journey was not as perilous as I feared.

For me, character is always king, and if there’s a problem, character is usually my starting point. Maybe I don’t know my character as well as I had hoped. Maybe I’m forcing my character to do things for the sake of plot, rather than letting him or her evolve organically. The solution, for me, is always to put the novel down, move outside its confines, and try to do some extra work that may never see its way into the novel, but is sure to pay dividends.

Rather than trying to force words into my character’s mouth, I try to get him or her to talk to me. I ask my character, “So tell me, what is it that you’re so pissed off about?” And then I let the character speak. It often comes out in a surge of words, so I inevitably feel as if I am simply transcribing what the character is saying to me. While not all of this character-speak is useable, there is almost always one diamond or two that I can use. Letting a character talk is a great way to make the character more alive, and it’s a way to exercise your subconscious. Also, it relieves the tension of trying to get the novel right, because you’re not actually working in the novel at the moment, you’re working off of it. You somehow don’t feel as tense, because there’s no pressure except discovery.

I know a lot of writers who read their work aloud when they get stuck. Not me. I print out my difficult pages in a new font. You’d be amazed how different the work looks, how new it reads. Suddenly, ideas you didn’t see before spring to the surface.

I also might take the offending scene (and again, this is out-of-the-novel work) and rewrite it from the viewpoint of another character. I won’t ever use this work in the novel itself, but it’s astonishing what it can reveal, like a heat missile heading for a target I totally missed seeing.

All of these are tools—like a life jacket or a pair of swim fins—to keep you from drowning, and to help you realize, that yes, you can swim.

About the Author

Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World, Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Various titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines.

Her ninth novel, Pictures of You, went into three printings months before publication and is now in its fourth printing. A New York Times bestseller, it was also a Costco “Pennie’s Pick,” A San Francisco Chronicle Editor’s Choice “Lit Pick,” and was one of the top 20 books published so far in 2011, as named by BookPage. Pictures of You was also on the Best Books of 2011 lists from The San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, Bookmarks Magazine and Kirkus Reviews. Caroline has been a judge in both the Writers’ Voice Fiction Awards in New York City and the Midatlantic Arts Grants in Fiction. She teaches novel writing online at both Stanford University and UCLA Extension Writers Program, as well as working with writers privately.

More content from this author