Reasons Why You Can't Write Your Scene

While it’s nice to sit down and write to your heart’s content and the words flow endlessly from your fingertips until–bam! You write 10,000 words in one sitting, we all know that does not happen every time you sit down to write. Sometimes (or, perhaps, a lot of times) you get stuck and you either sit aimlessly staring at a blank screen or you end up doing everything but the actual writing.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s very common, no matter how long you’ve been writing. Today, I’m breaking down common reasons you get stuck in your writing and how to help.

1. You haven’t planned enough to write the scene. Even if you are a proud pantser, this still applies to you. When the words aren’t happening, it may be because you need to go back to the drawing board and consider what the next logical step in the story would be. Perhaps you need to dig deeper into your world-building or think about your characters responses to what is happening in the story.

2. Your scene needs more substance. Even when you’ve planned a scene to go a certain way, sometimes during the actual writing process, you learn that your original plan is not as good or simply doesn’t work. If you’re losing interest in your words, you’ve guaranteed to have lost your reader’s interest as well. Is there a plot twist that could shake things up? My personal favorite is going back to the characters. What would be the worst thing that could happen in the scene you’re trying to write? What character flaws could you exploit and challenge? These are great ways to add tension to your story and give a lot of direction for the actual writing of the scene. For more information about characters and making them life-like you can read our previous post here.

3. You’re not in a headspace to write. This one I think will rub some people the wrong way. Hear me out: I’m not saying to only write when you’re motivated, you definitely want to build a habit of writing consistently however, please be kind to your mental health. Some days, even if you know you should be writing, if you are so stressed that you can’t think straight, or so exhausted that you can barely hold your eyes open, you are not going to produce the content you want. Rest. Put your writing aside without guilt so that when you do come back to your project, you are in a better headspace.

Kamryn and I are co-writers and we depend on the other to write scenes separately at times and there have been several instances where we’ve had to delay our chapters to each other because we just couldn’t get in the right headspace. Even if this meant taking a few extra days, our writing was much stronger than if we had simply forced ourselves to push through.

Honestly, your headspace affects your writing almost more than anything else. I remember Kamryn commenting (on my first-draft of a chapter, no less) that certain scenes she could tell I was, “in-it” and it was some of my best writing. It was when I felt the most emotionally connected to the story. Life is hard and overwhelming sometimes and if you aren’t able to emotionally connect to your story for a bit, there’s nothing wrong with taking a break and focusing on yourself. For Visionary, we took a five-year hiatus and I am so glad we did.

4. You’re trying too hard. Look, as much as we love a well-written sentence that has us stopping and reflecting on life, that may not happen when you first sit down to write a scene. Your first draft is a first draft and will not be what the readers sit down to read. It does not have to be perfect and you will waste so much time and energy if you focus too much on trying to impress with your writing. Your first draft should be about telling a story that you love. What’s happening? How does your character react to it? What’s setting up to happen next? There will be plenty of opportunity to edit your writing later and work on prose and fine-tuning (So. Much. Editing.).

5. You need to rewrite your previous scene(s). This one hurts. But oftentimes the problem lies in the setup. You thought of a cool way to end a scene but then have no idea how to follow it up or the new trajectory completely goes against the outline. Either way, none of your writing is safe from the dreaded delete button and you as the writer have to be willing to write and rewrite until your story is the best it can be.

Let me now put myself under the bus and talk about how I’ve been not-so-subtly putting off a chapter for an embarrassingly long time now. Kamryn and I are writing our second novel in The Visionary series and we absolutely love it, but now we are in the super exciting parts we’ve been building up for and nearly the climax of the novel. Now, it’s my chapter and I sat down–a few months ago–and the words simply weren’t happening. I had only a few pages and I wasn’t proud of my writing. It wasn’t going anywhere, it didn’t have the excitement, and I had to tell Kamryn, “Don’t read it, I need to scrap it and rewrite it.”

Now, flash-forward we have had a ton of life events going on that has significantly reduced our writing time and we took a small hiatus to jump into the joys of querying for agents (cries) and we are just now re-reading our work and gearing up to jump back into writing. I think I had a combination of all the problems listed, making me stumble into the ultimate writer’s-block. But, it's okay and I have a plan to actually write my chapter I can be proud of. I’ve taken my break, and together we have gone over our outline and decided on ways that the scene needs to go. I thought about the characters in my scene and what I could draw on from them and their character-arcs to help the chapter be what it needs to be. Sadly, that means there is quite a lot of rewriting to do, even on our previous chapters. But, it will be worth it and this story is something we love so much and are so proud of.

Our hearts and souls and tears have gone into these pages and will be worth all the heartache and bumps along the way. Please don’t give up on your beautiful stories, fellow writers. It’s so hard to write a novel but your efforts mean so much. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without my favorite stories from authors who likely struggled writing their novel’s too. With that cheesy sentiment aside–fix your mistakes and write-on! See y’all next week for the reading wrap-up!