In a lot of ways, Plotting and Pantsing aren’t such different approaches to writing a novel. Really, they’re just time-shifted ways of doing the same thing. Plotters try to work it all out in advance, Pantsers try to just let inspiration be their guide, but either way you find yourself at the same plot moments, and you’ll struggle at similar points when you’ve written yourself into a bit of a corner.
Every writer, whether staring down at a neat outline or riffling through hundreds of pages of already-completed manuscript, has hit that moment when they don’t know what happens next in their plot. Sometimes you’ve maneuvered your characters into a spot you can’t get them out of, sometimes you just don’t know what to throw at them next, or how to get from A to B.
When that happens to me, I save my file, close it, open a blank file, and start a short story.
Outfoxing Myself
The brain is a wonderful thing, and it’s going to keep working on your story even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. Sometimes, though, when you’re staring at a problem you get in your own way. The best thing to do is to trick yourself.
When I start a short story in the middle of a novel, it’s like hitting the reset button, because my brain shoots back into Beginning Mode, where the blank page is all possibility, instead of Problem Mode, where the blank page is all block and confusion. I get back to that crazy energy at the beginning of any story, when you’re excited and the story could branch off into any of a zillion possible routes. It’s very cathartic when I’ve been stuck on a plot point for a long time.
It doesn’t matter what the story is about, or whether it turns out to be any good. All that matters is that I take a break from my current plot problem and think on something else for a while. Just about every time I try this technique, I come back to my novel with a new idea for solving whatever plot problem I’ve been wrestling with. It’s basically tricking yourself, but it works.
Plus, you get a bonus short story that maybe you can sell somewhere. Or, sometimes, a rambling short story that ends with everyone dying in a plane crash because that story also led you to a maddening dead end. In writing, it’s often turtles all the way down—or, you know, instead of turtles, failed stories. I need a drink.