I tried the exercises. I wrote in different rooms of the house, different times of day. I tried writing something completely unrelated to shake myself out of a rut. I freewrote. You name it; I tried it. But none of it mattered because I’d managed to write myself into a corner. Everywhere I looked, there were obstacles. Somehow I’d worked my way into a scene I couldn’t get past because everything that would come after seemed to hinge upon it. Everything.

You see, there was this one character – not even the main one – who was still a mystery to me, and I simply couldn’t figure out what she wanted or how she would react in a particular situation. Problem was, she and the main character had reached a crisis together, and while I had a firm grip on what my protagonist wanted and felt, this girl was a puzzle.

As I sat and stared at the blank page or typed and deleted dialogue alternately, I began to despair of ever making it past the scene. I considered skipping it, leaving some blank space, and jumping ahead to a later section, giving myself a pass until a later date. But since I had no idea what was going to happen next to these two characters, I felt strongly that I just needed to wade through the problematic scene – somehow.

So that’s my very unglamorous advice for today. Sometimes you just have to keep writing. There’s no shortcut or trick. I just kept pulling out the laptop and typing and deleting and retyping until one day I realized I had made it over the hump. I had moved through the scene and landed in a place where I could once again work and breathe. The claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a dead end scene was gone. It didn’t happen in a day, or even in a week. But I had chipped away at the barrier in my brain a little at a time, and my story is flowing freely once again.