Hitting a brick wall at 38K

I ran into this problem a couple of days ago. Jumped ahead to a scene that I really wanted to write and have been going full steam ahead. At some point I'll have to come back and deal with the skipped action but it will probably have to be after NaNo is done because it means rewriting a couple of chapters and changing the arc of the character who was supposed to be the hero, but isn't. (The rotter! Changing his motivation when I wasn't looking."

Do whatever it takes to get writing again. Good luck!

In my first NaNo, I hit a brick wall at about 20K. I could not figure out what was supposed to happen next. After about a day of beating my head against the computer screen (figuratively), I realized that my beginning was wrong. The approach I'd taken had completely destroyed any sense of mystery in the story.

What I decided to do was change the beginning, but since this was NaNo, I didn't want to get rid of what I'd already written. So I wrote some notes into the file about the changes I wanted to make, then continued on as if those changes had already been made. If you read the draft in order, my MCs get introduced to the same characters twice for the first time.

In this year's NaNo, I was having trouble getting motivated to write a particular scene, so I jumped ahead and wrote the next scene. Once that was written, the scene I skipped came into focus so I wrote that, and now I'm ready to continue onward.

So consider what's bothering you. Is it story direction or just lack of interest in a particular scene? Skip forward if that will help. There's no rule that says you have to write all the scenes in order. Since this is NaNo, if you're going to throw out a scene you've written, I suggest leaving it in the file so it gets counted towards the NaNo goal, but grey it out or something so that you know it's not part of the actual story.

Good luck in whatever you choose!

It happened to me at 40k, so I wrote the last few chapters, figuring I'll get back to the (obviously sagging) middle when I revise in December.

Glad to help!

Another trick to gag the internal editor is to think of this as an extended outline. You're playing with different story directions. If one fizzles, that's all right. Keep moving. There are plenty of other directions to try.

The story where I hit the brick wall was my first NaNo attempt three years ago. I hit the 50K but never finished the story. This year I'm rewriting that story using the first attempt as a jumping off point, and I'm hoping to hit both 50K and THE END.

Whatever you decide to do, just don't delete those words...strike through them, cut and past to bottom or whatever if you're going to get rid of them all together...but they still count towards the total on the 30th

I've already had to jump back and forth in the story several times. The middle part is too hard for me to write now without a detailed outline and I've decided to avoid it altogether. Summarise your difficult chapters in a sentence--'And then Protagonist, who was a farm boy, somehow became the king.' or 'And then Protagonist escaped from that maximum security prison using only a pair of scissors somehow.'-- and jump to a part of the story you are comfortable with. You can turn the summary into proper prose after you figure out what's supposed to happen and how.

The fifth chapter of my nine chapter NaNo consists of about a 500 word summary. I've got about a thousand deleted words somewhere along the way, plus during the third quarter the whole story disolves into rampant silliness - BUT - I finished a draft of a novel for the first time in 35 years of wanting to write a novel and I have a decent first half and a second half that will need major work if I chose to work on it in the future.

can you do it?

YES YOU CAN!

Basically-- look- what I would do in the same case is to just start to write-- perhaps the stuff that should fill it in more. Do it at the end of the book. It will be a muddled jumble but you can start to sort it out in December. I've got various places where i am just writing some stuff that I realised should have gone in a chapter that I have gone way past. I know that after the 30th of november I will take the time, go over it, and re-shape it. What you are doing in the first draft is creating the "cloth" but you will be tailoring it and stitching it together later. What this is about is speed and word count-- so just create content and worry about it later.