No doubt about it, planning out a story is harder than just typing what’s freely floating in your mind. And stubbornly flaunting directions to avoid adding an element that is proven not to work is useless folly. You end up with watery, unjelled Jell-O.
But the thinking, thinking, thinking about a story sometimes will spark the next line. On two stories I’m working on right now, one of which has been hanging at the last scene for months, I may have finally found a direction.
What I’ve needed to ask all along—and have laid out here in a post many moons ago—is: So? It’s the rude equivalent of “What happened then?” but it’s often a faster solution because its very quality of challenge spurs one to immediacy in response.
I’m often stubborn, slow and clingy, in writing just as in life. While no one changes overnight, and sometimes can never be changed at all in some ways, it behooves (I had a high school principal who just loved that word; he’d drag it out with a piercing stare that was quite effective and still visualized to this day) us to lay down our weapons, especially when we’re using them against our own ambitions.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology