I've written myself into a hole

Lou Trent

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I'm currently writing a short(ish) story for my blog which should be be around 10,000 words once finished and I have a deadline to completely finish and edit it. Unfortunately I've written myself into a hole and can't seem to get out of it so I may have to start writing it again from the beginning. I would like to avoid that if possible as it'll make it difficult to finish with enough time for my beta to read it before I post it. I'm about half way through right now. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions or techniques that can help me get out of this without re writing the whole thing. Thank you.
 

Maggie Maxwell

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Usually when that happens to me, I rewind to the last place before I wrote myself into the corner and try a different path for the characters. If you don't want to spend the time to make sure this one works, try outlining from that point before the hole and figuring out that way if your path is a viable one.
 

Woollybear

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I don't know if it will help or not but the snowflake method is a technique for novel writing specifically designed to help avoid this issue.

I think you could try it, at least steps 1, 3, and 4--and see if it helps. You'll need to sort of think in terms of short story instead of novel of course. But the approach, I suspect, would still work.

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/
 

EvilPenguin

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I read something just yesterday that a good exercise is brainstorming what CAN'T happen next to try to figure out what actually CAN happen. Not sure if it would work in your situation, but it sounded interesting. Maggie's suggestion of going back to an earlier scene and trying a different path is a good one, too.
 

lonestarlibrarian

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You know where you started.

When you started, did you know where you wanted to end?

If you knew where you wanted to end, it should be pretty easy to figure out when things got off-track. Keep the writing that went off in the wrong direction; just put it at the end of your file, two or three pages down where you can't see it. Then, after you've started writing in the new direction, it will be easier to get rid of that part when you've got something better to replace it with.

If you had your idea, and just started writing, and you didn't really know where you were heading... stop and figure out where you were heading. The ideas are the easy part, but stringing ideas into a compelling series of events that hang together for a purpose is much harder. And when we work with a short story format, we have a whole lot less leeway to write by the seat of our pants-- everything needs to fight tightly together in a compact space. (We've all read novels where we think, "Ugh, this writer was trying to pad their wordcount!")

So, you've got your start. What are you obstacles? What are you motivations? What are your character's penalties for failure? What observations do you want to make? Does your character need to grow, or just act? What problems need to be solved? What are those random scenes that you've been wanting to write for years-- are any of them components of this story?

Figure out the logical bones. A --> B --> C --> D --> E. Then you can start padding out the narration and the dialogue and the character development and the world building, or whatever elements apply to your genre/story. After you've written it through, you can check your wordcount. If you were targeting something like 10k words, and your story only clocks in at 5k, you can look at it and see what needs to be developed. Is the story too compact, and there's room for an additional obstacle? Is something unfulfilling? Is something unclear? etc.

The nice thing about short stories is that they're usually small enough to fit in our heads, and because they're so short, they're usually easy enough to write in a short space of time before we forget what we were doing when we started something. (vs, say, the time necessary for a 100k-word novel.) But it's still important to have an idea of the thing as a whole, because otherwise, all you have is a vignette instead of a story.
 
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Lou Trent

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Thank you. My initial plot outline seemed solid but when it came to writing it the hole just came up. I'll try backing up a bit and see if I can work around it. I don't normally write to a fixed deadline like this so spending extra time on it would normally be ok. It's irritating that the one time I have no wiggle room in the deadline is the time when I could really do with more flexibility.
 

drdecadent

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Did you get it done? Which technique worked for you? I liked the idea about writing what couldn't happen but wonder if there would be too much to write. It does sound like a good way of brainstorming a new story.