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Stuck on one scene for 3 hours then blew through 2000 words in 20 minutes
I was at my kitchen table with this mystery prompt about a locked room and just couldnt get past the first paragraph. Finally I just deleted everything and started with a random detail about a broken clock on the wall instead. Has anyone else found that forcing a fresh start unsticks you way faster than trying to fix whats already there?
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lucashart19d agoMost Upvoted
Started rewriting a whole chapter from scratch after being stuck for days and yeah, deleting everything let my brain finally move forward instead of trying to polish a dead end. Tbh the broken clock trick works because the random detail gives your subconscious something to latch onto without making you overthink the plot.
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evaallen20d ago
...wait so the random detail about the broken clock, did you already have that in your head or did you literally just pick the first thing you saw in the room? I keep trying the "just write anything" trick but my brain still tries to force it into the plot instead of letting it be a weird loose end. Like I'll throw in a random blue coffee mug but then my inner editor is like "ok but what does the mug MEAN" and I get stuck again. Do you have a method for shutting that voice up or is it just a practice thing?
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I knew exactly what you meant with the inner editor thing. That little voice that won't let a broken clock just be a broken clock. It takes over and suddenly you're building a whole backstory about who broke it and why. A friend of mine used to get so stuck on this she'd rewrite the same page ten times because she couldn't stop herself from explaining every lamp and rug. Then one day she just set a timer for fifteen minutes and forced herself to type the first ridiculous thing that popped into her head. She wrote about a cat that kept knocking over a pencil holder and she had no idea what it meant for the story. But the funny thing is, after she let that cat just be a cat, her writing actually got looser and more natural. She still has to fight that editor voice sometimes, but she said the trick was to treat it like a toddler you just ignore for a little while.
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