If you’re stuck on still waters, waiting for the winds of inspiration to blow, you’re not alone. But being trapped in this waiting game can really slow down productivity, especially when deadlines loom. If you are looking to churn up the seas, and wake up your muse, perhaps some of these techniques can get the waves rolling.

While there are as many different approaches to writing as there are writers who write, a common approach that I’ve noticed particularly with newer writers is that they wait for inspiration. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this – those fleeting strokes of genius, those lightning strikes, are what inspire us all to begin, what light the fires in our minds to write and create – but finishing things is difficult if that is the only approach. At that point, it’s a limitation.

So how do you finish things?

There are a few different approaches you can take. Maybe one, a couple, or all of them will work for you at some point in your writing life. They all have the strengths and weaknesses, and there will be personality types that will prefer one over the other. There is no right or wrong way to go about it, just so long as you find a way to accomplish whatever your goals may be, and get through to that final period on the final sentence.

Visualization

Perhaps one of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to rustle up the imagination is to get comfortable, lay back, close your eyes, and start playing your story in your mind. Whether it’s a particular scene that you’re struggling with, or if you’re trying to reinspire yourself for a work that you’ve grown tired with, putting yourself inside of a character, or as a fly on the wall witnessing the story playing in your mind, can be a fun way to reinvigorate and bring things back to life in your mind. Do you need to figure out how to get your character from here to there an but you’re unsure how to go about it? Play out the different scenarios in your mind, and see where they take you.

Brainstorming

if you’re stuck on a particular scene or plot twist or character development, brainstorming might be the way to go. Brainstorming is a slightly different visual exercise. In this one, you write it down. Get yourself a blank sheet of paper and simply let the ideas spill out of you. This is particularly helpful if you can’t decide what to do next, because you can jot down the different potential scenarios, and see how all the options might play out.

Working Backwards

Building off of the brainstorming idea, working backwards is especially helpful if you know where things need to end up, but you don’t know how to get there. Whether it’s a plot development, character arc, or combination of both, if you know how things need to be for a following scene or the ending, working backwards to where you are stuck is an especially helpful way to plot your course.

Character Backstories

This one can be a slippery slope into taking you away from actual writing, but it’s almost always fun so we tend not to mind too much, lol. When you are really at an impasse with your character and you’re not sure how they will interact in a particular scene, or what choice they might make at a particularly important junction, it can be really helpful to just step away from the novel for a moment and really get into your character and understand who they are.

Get a fresh page or document and note down the things that have already been revealed in the novel, and let your imagination fill in the gaps about the rest of their life: what their childhood was like, their upbringing, their education, their relationships. So many factors and even little traumas and triumphs throughout life can inform a lot about the character.

Another good reason why this is helpful regardless of whether you’re stuck or not is that it helps you really flesh out your character. By getting this out on the page away from the novel, it reduces the chance of you bogging down your plot with unnecessary exposition. Explore it all here so that you can let those details unravel organically in the story.

What Makes it Special

Sometimes when our imagination starts to dry up and the creativity well runs dry, it’s easy to lose interest in a story, or we begin to think that it sucks and we’re the worst and we can’t imagine how it could possibly ever be good. Or whatever other possible negative scenario you can conjure up. This is just a little devil on your shoulder, and whether you believe it or not, you do have the power to shut his little trap.

When those negative thoughts start to overpower you and cast a shadow over all the excitement you once had, give yourself a moment to remind yourself why the story was important to you in the first place. Why did you want to write it? What is it about the characters or place that means something to you? What is the story you’re trying to tell, and why was it so special to you? Turn your focus to these thoughts, and it will pull the spotlight away from the devil on your shoulder, and take the microphone away from the negative self-talk.

There is no right or wrong way to go about the writing process, so long as what you are able to do aligns with what you actually want to do. Once you know what your goals are, you can learn the different techniques and how to use them to help you get there.

Ultimately, it boils down to a choice and how ready you are to put the work in. You can wait for the lightning to strike, or you can fly a kite in the thunderstorm.