Like getting the last of the toothpaste from the tube?

My answer is yes.

I keep finding new ways to "tell" my scenes, and that is distracting, to say the least. I lose a lot of time
deciding which way to go, and then, when I have it written, I can still change my mind and it's the same all over again.

I'm not quite understanding what you mean. Is it that you don't know the particular mechanics of the magic, or is it that you don't know how to get certain characters out of the scene in order to leave just the MC?

I had that same dilemma. It was the MC and two of his friends. I was having a hard time figuring out how to leave the MC by himself.

It took me about a month to think of how to do this... and then I had an epiphany and figured it out.

Since your world involves magic, you probably did a lot of world-building, dropping little clues here and there about certain magical items, people, etc.. Use this world-building as a foreshadowing device.

For example: EDITED BECAUSE OF REASONS.

Go back to something that you may have already established. Think about how it would work in your favor. Cleverness goes a long way.

I have horrible, horrible problems with logic. I had to go through roughly forty bajillion (maybe just forty I dunno) revisions in order to figure out the "logic" behind my MS, and there are still some blank spaces. (Hopefully they are irrelevant spaces.) For me, it's more like smashing bone into powder with my forehead. (...I don't know why you would pulverize bone into powder. Could probably sell as an aphrodisiac. Whatevs.)

But yeah. I'd get stuck almost every chapter, push through, make something up, keep going...find out it didn't work, revise...ugh. The whole thing is just a bad obnoxious process. There's always something. "Okay, I have to bring this character back from death"; "Okay, they're in a hole and now they have to get out," "okay, she's in a situation where she will definitely die unless the potential murderer has some reason not to" blah blah. But I found that, magically, a lot of the answers that I finally came upon wove together nicely...

(I think...)

Anyway. Yes. I can relate. Me and logic are not good together. I think I should really force myself to make a rudimentary outline or something from now on...

I've always given my characters tool to find their way out of a situation.

If they have a problem, it's not my job to figure it out, it's theirs.


Start thinking in the character's position, find how you would escape the situation and then write it.

Take a bath. Candles. Close your eyes. Don't think directly about it. Stay immersed until wrinkled. I've had amazing ideas come in the tub.

Freewrite or make quick lists of ideas you don't care are goofy or do a cluster, some less logical brainstorming process to get you, eventually, to the logically viable idea.

Swear that you'll throw the danged novel away and vow to become an oyster shucker instead. Okay, maybe not that one, but i was listing what I've done in such cases in the past. This never helped, actually.

good luck!

Things I've done when a scene is giving me grief, which may or may not work for you:

--Scream at my stupid characters to stop being stupid (doesn't work)

--Start the scene over from scratch, again and again, with different opening points and/or different POVs (works, but is an enormous PITA)

--Stop writing. Spend some time thinking about all of these things: the rules of the world, the characters' motivations, the characters themselves, some scene in the future that this scene will affect, whether the scene is really necessary (sometimes works, sometimes leads to massive revising of other parts of the book to make what was figured out during brainstorming fit).

--Run about madly for a few days wailing and gnashing teeth, complaining that Stupid Scene is Stupid and I Hate It and Want The Whole Book to Die. Realize the scene doesn't work because IT'S THE WRONG SCENE. Write the correct scene. (works, takes time, costs more of my dwindling supply of sanity)

--Think logically about what needs to happen in the scene in order to advance the sto--oh, wait. I've never done that...

Anyway, I've unfortunately found that 9 times out of 10, a scene doesn't work because it's the wrong scene, and I need to backtrack until I figure out where I made a wrong turn in the story, and start reworking from there. Not the funnest thing ever. Especially this one time that I had to do this with a whole entire novel that I'd written completely wrong...

TL;DR version: Perhaps you've taken a wrong turn somewhere, and either need to change something that comes before this scene, or write a different scene before you get to this one?

Why not show us one of the MC's has a sword earlier in the story?

I just went through this same problem a while ago. The best advice I can give: think on it. Move around the room, listen to music, try acting out the scene. Things like that. Sometimes just sitting in silence (not staring at the screen in front of you) can help as well. Just work your way through it. And if you don't like what you do, you can always change it later.