3 Exercises to Get Your Writing Unstuck

Call it writer’s block or imposter syndrome. Maybe we’re stuck because we find the world difficult and scary (it is), or maybe we are crippled by anxiety over our own abilities and the fear of failure (we are). Every writer in the history of writers has faced the feeling of a brick wall or a steep cliff. Fear is part of art, but it does not have to be the place art ends.

(We Are Our Art, and Our Art Is Us.)

I have written three novels and two collections of short stories. Another way to say this is that I have spent a large part of the last two decades in one state or another of failure and confusion. Stuck. I have been stuck in early stages, when those blank pages feel like an inescapable void. I have felt stuck in the endless middle, where I often look up and wonder when the expert will arrive who knows which path is correct, which decision will lead me home. I have been stuck and afraid in the end, when the world outside begins to look prickly and dangerous for my new art-baby. In every case it feels as if I am surrounded by walls. Sound familiar?

In my decades of writing and teaching I have created (and gathered from other amazing writers) exercises and experiments that I have come to think of as doorways in and through all those seemingly impervious walls. A doorway is a liminal space where we grow, where one being transforms into another, the space between winter and spring, where the wardrobe turns into a magical land.

Here are three doors to knock on when you are feeling outside of your own writing, overwhelmed by the prospect of this work, or doubtful of your abilities—and the exercises, presented as keys, to unlock them. They are doorways that get you back inside or closer to your work, that will make you excited and curious again, that allow you to write toward the original love of making sentences and paragraphs and stories about the way it feels to be a person alive in the world right now.

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Doorway: Scissors and Glue: Rearrange, Resee

We write in whatever order the ideas occur to us, or in the logic of our original vision. How it comes is how it comes. But how it comes is not how it necessarily has to or wants to stay. I say constantly to my students that every part is a moving part. This includes choices about point of view and setting and time period and voice and every other craft-level decision we writers make. It also includes the structure of each scene or line and the piece as a whole. How it is built is part of what it is and does.

I am a cut-and-paste superfan. Reordering can completely change the way a story feels. When a document is open on the screen, it’s essentially a very long scroll, and while sentence-level changes or plopping a paragraph from page 1 to page 3 is easy, bigger rearrangements get difficult to track. This is when it’s time to print the whole thing out and get physical.

KEY:

Print what you have and gather scissors and, if you want, a glue stick and some blank paper. Depending on what you have, you’ll cut the piece into different-sized sections. For a short story, I usually cut at the scene level. If it’s a poem, you can cut at the line level. Rearrange. You can glue your reordered version down on the blank paper and then reprint, rearrange, and glue again to see another possibility. If you are working on a bigger scale (rather than line by line), you might not need the glue but could simply take photos of different arrangements.

Step two is to read these versions and take note of what they do and how they feel. Feel free to repeat the process now that you have a sense of what changes when you make these kinds of moves. Once you have a new order you’re into (for now! It can change again and again!), go back to your document, Save As so you don’t lose any history, and make the shifts there. This is now your working draft.

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Doorway: Fairy Tale-ify: Using “Once upon a Time” to Find the Frame

Former Pixar story artist Emma Coats once tweeted one of the studio’s framing devices. It’s useful exactly because it’s highly simplified, designed to give me a sense of what I do and do not know about the big-picture scaffolding of my current story. This structure won’t truly fit rangier work, and you shouldn’t feel that you must force it to. Instead of being a structure you must conform to, this structure feels to me like a kind of magnifying glass to peek through. It tells me as much about how I want to break with convention as it does about how much I want to follow it. It goes like this:

Once upon a time . . .

And every day . . .

Until one day . . .

And because of this . . .

Until finally . . .

And ever since that day . . .

You can see how neatly every conventional film fits into this frame. And yet it gives you a tiny little map for the bigger idea, and a tiny map that you can glance at in one second can be a great gift.

KEY:

Try to plug your piece (or what you know of it) into this frame. Maybe it becomes the navigational tool in the way it was intended—hooray if so! Maybe it becomes a kind of anti-map—a way of seeing how you don’t want to follow conventional narrative—hooray if so!

This is a tool to revisit as your sense of the object changes.

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Doorway: Structure as Ecosystem: Story as Floodplain, as Marsh, as Desert Mesa

Every spring my family takes a river trip on the Colorado River for three nights. We load rafts with sleeping bags and tents and camp chairs and huge jugs of water and food and every possible snack option (this is my primary role on the boat: snack lady) and float from Fruita, Colorado, past the Utah border. At first, the river is wide and the banks soft with pale green grass and mud. By the end of the first day, we enter Horsethief Canyon, which has light sandstone walls bedazzled with the nests of cliff swallows. On river right there are grassy flats where we once saw a black bear drinking from a shallow eddy. Farther on, the canyon walls stretch high and red on both sides. I like to lie on the front of the boat and look at the strata of rock reaching hundreds of feet up to the blue sky. The river has carved our path deeper into geological time, from the soft dirt of the present to the black of Precambrian granite formed 1.8 billion years ago.

A river canyon is the narrative structure of time itself. Time as layers, the earth forming and building, water carving a path over its own long course. The river itself is a story—it begins small and high and follows a path that is never straight but always logical. The twists of the story move around boulders, cliff walls, wind. Resistance shapes everything, as forward energy shapes everything.

In her wonderful book Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison writes, “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison suggests that instead of always having to summit a mountain and descend changed and awakened, we can widen our narrative possibilities to include such shapes as a winding river, a series of wavelets, a firework, a cellular structure. There are infinite shapes in the world, so why shouldn’t there be infinite shapes for stories or essays?

While I lie on the warm rubber of the raft with my dog on my chest, the cliffs and land are the backstory and the river is the present moment. The Colorado is so thick with silt—matter carried from upstream—that it cannot easily be filtered. The story carries the past. The story is thick with all it holds.

KEY:

Look inside the piece you are writing for natural phenomena or elements already present. If the story is set in a high mountain town during winter, maybe the snow banked up around the house suggests a story shape. Look at a dogwood tree, an acorn, leathery kelp stalks, the lace of ice on the windshield in the morning.

You might find a shape or structure for the whole project or for one scene. As with all things, the point is to open toward something, not to stick to it perfectly. It’s more than okay if your dogwood-flower shape outgrows itself or shifts. What is more natural than evolution?

**Check out Ramona Ausubel's Unstuck here:**

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Ramona AusubelAuthor

Ramona Ausubel is the author of five books, most recently The Last Animal which was a national bestseller, received the National Book Foundation Science + Nature Prize and was a Barnes & Noble book of the month. Her previous books are Awayland: Stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and has taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars, Tin House Writing Workshop, Writing by Writers, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Environmental, Writing Workshop Paris and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.