Is Your Story Stuck?

Whether you’re a pantster, a plotter, or you prefer an organic style of writing, you may at some point find your story mired and hopelessly stuck.

The cause probably isn’t because your characters have taken up picket signs and gone on strike. When that happened to me, I was forced to renegotiate a new contract.

They now have better health care than I do.

It may or may not be your plot development because:

As a pantster, you live vicariously in the land of now.

As a plotter, you already know most of your story’s future.

As a writer who believes in organic evolution, you’re waiting for your story to blossom and grow.

And yet for some inexplicable reason, your story is stuck, and you’re not entirely sure how to get all the bubble gum off the bottom of your shoe and get it on track again.

Maybe it’s time for a little reverse engineering.

First, let’s examine what reverse engineering really is.

Reverse engineering is the process of deconstructing something to reveal it’s design or architecture or to extract knowledge from said something.

Ah, all you wizards out there have already picked up on the central issue, haven’t you? I bet you’re saying, “Dude, my story hasn’t been completed yet. Hello? It’s stuck, remember? How in the heck can I deconstruct something not even finished yet?”

I’ll get to that. Hang on.

At the beginning of my writing career, and even now, I was a bit of a panster. For me, the norm was cultivating a tiny spark of an idea and then rolling the story out.

Unfortunately, during all my winding and weaving my way along, I often hit a dead end, and my entire writing process screeched to a halt.

Then I decided to plot my story’s future or at least the immediate future, and off I’d go again. The road was a whole lot smoother, and the story zipped along. That is until it hit a monster pothole, and one of the story’s wheels fell off.

So, I decided the next time, I’d do just a tiny bit of pantsting (old habits die awfully hard for me) a whole lot of plotting, and I’d let the story grow organically.

Let it bloom. Nurture it until it blossomed into a beautiful story.

Oh, I nurtured it all right. I nurtured that little sucker right into a dead-end street and a brick wall.

Doh!

I was frustrated as heck as I put the story in reverse and backed out of the alleyway. I was so frustrated I parked the story. Everything I’d tried to do led to different potholes, but disruptive potholes still the same. Each time I got the story moving forward, I drove it into a dead-end or a brick wall.

What the heck was I doing wrong?

That’s when I thought of what Franklin Covey once said.

Begin with the end in mind.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is — kinda, sorta maybe.

I know a lot of you free spirits are going to take issue with this question, but when was the last time you took a trip (not acid) without a final destination in mind?

Right.

Where do you want your story to end? How do you want it to end? Have you thought about the end, the actual ending of your story?

So here’s the deal. You need to slap your bogged-down story (and maybe a character or two) around with a Franklin Covey approach.

You need to try a little reverse engineering.

Think about it. Let’s say your story has a really strong, weak, cute, robust, ugly, sensitive, insensitive, drunk, sober, flighty, dependable, alien, character and you plan on killing him/her/it (okay, it dies a dramatic death, but they still get killed…by you) at the end of the story.

How is he, she, it going to die?

In a hospital bed, on a battlefield, stuffed in a Port-A-Potty?

Now ask yourself how you want your alien character to die in the Port-A-Potty.

Then put your build process in reverse and find the event or events which led to the character being in the smelly crap collector in the first place.

Are the events in the story?

If not, maybe you’ve discovered a pothole you need to fill.

Keep going backward.

Look in your story for details of how the alien character came about, or perhaps some other character it pissed off so bad they want it dead. Was your alien such a monster that the entire population of planet Earth wanted it dead?

Or could it only survive on toxic fumes emanating from a Port-A-Potty?

Is the story which is supposed to support your ending there?

If not, maybe you’ve discovered a dead-end or brick wall.

Keep going back until you’ve flushed out all the potholes, dead ends, and brick walls. Keep reverse engineering until you’re satisfied that the story you’ve written as you plowed forward supports and sustains the ending you planned.

Guess what? Your story isn’t stuck anymore, and it’s moving around the track again.

This tactic does have it’s drawback folks. Be forewarned and forearmed. There are times when the ending you’ve planned isn’t supported by the story, but the story is so darned tight (IYHO) you choose to change the end.

It happens.

It’s whatever it takes to get your story moving again, right?

So what if the alien doesn’t die in a Port-A-Potty, and it and your heroine get married instead?

Everybody knows alien’s don’t have the ability to take a dump anyway, so why in the heck would it want to get in there?

Oh, I see, it thought the Port-A-Potty was a phone booth.

Now I get it. It was trying to phone home.

I hope it wasn’t a collect call.

That’s gonna be expensive.

Thanks For Reading

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© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.