I’ve done a good many writing exercises in creative writing classes and in writer’s groups, and they’ve been fairly helpful or at least interesting. However, it strikes me that while there are many writing exercises concerning how to come up with ideas, there aren’t that many on how to FINISH them.

What do you do when you reach a scene that you can’t get past? How do you defeat the infamous writer’s block?  When you’ve painted your character(s) in a corner, how can you write in the escape without the unsatisfying “with a leap, Jones was free” set up of a deus ex machina?

We know from various sources that often the best thing to do when we are stuck is to focus on character. Have the character write a letter or journal entry that helps us understand them more completely, thereby letting us know how they would react in various situations. But what if, say, you have a character who gets in panic attacks every time they see a spider and now they have to…I don’t know…fly an airplane overrun with arachnids? The usual solution to this is have someone talk the character through everything, calming them down and so on, but this introduces a new character into the story and therefore more complexity. Also, you risk moving the focus from the character that has the problem, to the character that is solving it for him or her. Now you might get away with this if the helper’s voice reminds the character of his or her father and it was his or her father that was originally responsible for the character’s arachnophobia. But this is a very specific event in history that one would have to reveal earlier in backstory and/or suss out in detail on one’s own time.

Which is, of course, why not everyone is a writer. But while there may not be any getting away from the difficulty of the craft, for me personally at least, there is a tendency to run away from the problem rather than tackle it head on. Indeed there is another school of thought which suggests this is the best course of action when writer’s block looms like a ponderous weight over one’s head. Get some distance from the work for a while, live life, smell the roses etc, and then go back to writing, refreshed and ready to go.

But works of literature are like petulant and moody children and if they’re alone for too long they’ll lash out at you when you try to work with them again, making it all but impossible to finish.

So there are three apparently contradictory elements at play here when we need to finish a scene such as the arachnophobe on the spider plane scenario.

###First we need to know the character intimately.

###Then we have to be able to focus on the scene without depending too much on new characters or lengthy back story.

###And finally we must maintain some distance from what we are writing.

Now I am by no means an expert. The method I’ve come up with may not work for all. Still, I feel that the main thing is to confront our literary demons and look at where we are stuck rather than let the problems with our stories fester.

So here’s the plan:

THE PLAN:

1. Take a scene from a story you are working on which has you stuck. To keep this exercise from taking too long it’s probably best to choose a scene that’s no more than 550 words long.

2. Discuss what about the scene has you stuck, either with your writing group, a friend or family member, or in a short paragraph or journal entry.

3. Free write. This should take no more than an hour. Make a poem or free association about the scene that's giving you trouble. Free writing is probably the most readily available way to free yourself from your block, because you probably already have all the necessary materials available to you. However if this doesn’t work, or you think it won’t, remember the main thing here is to shed new light on an old problem. If free writing doesn’t work for you perhaps putting the events of the scene in the frame work of something you enjoy or are accustomed to might help. For instance if you are teacher, try writing a scene where you’re explaining your scene to your class. Or if you’re a chess aficionado try assigning chess pieces to your characters and elements of your setting and moving them around.

4. Take a break for a bout half an hour. During this time, don’t think about the scene at all. Go watch some television or read the newspaper or something. The thoughts you have about the scene while not thinking about the scene will probably be the best thoughts about the scene you’ve ever had.

5. Rewrite the scene. Do this with out looking at what you've written before. Ernest Hemmingway had to rewrite almost all of his short stories after losing his manuscripts. He later said it was the best thing that ever happened to him, because it forced him to rethink his works and in the process he made them better. (I’m paraphrasing a good deal here.) However don’t take this too seriously. This “revision” is only a new way of looking at the scene. It won’t, and shouldn’t be perfect. In your revision you may want to use a different point of view. If you’re doing the arachnophobe in the airplane full of spiders scene, for instance, you might try using the perspective of one of the spiders.

6. Now you may look at your previous work. You may at this point want to amputate it from the rest of the story and add a polished version of your revision to the stump, or you may want to mold what’s there into something more useable, or you may want to forge a new scene from the remnants of your old, failed one. Now, however, you should have an idea of what you want the scene to have and where you want to go afterwards.

The idea here is to run around the problem and then attack it, rather than running away from it, or butting your head against it. You may have a better idea how best to do this, these are merely suggestions.

Hopefully after doing all this you’ll have a way out of your block and you’ll be able to continue writing till your story’s conclusion.