I'm still writing mine (well, actually tonight I'm just doing work work :-( (taking a brief break) but I plan to cross 50K tomorrow) but my novel hit a hard wall around 44K, the first time in years that that has happened for me.
You remember in the Lord of the Rings Return of the King how Frodo, Sam and Gollum go wandering around the grey and desolate landscape going to Mordor? They travel on and on and on... it's definitely not my favorite part of the trilogy.
My band of stuffed animals are doing something similar, wandering across a desolate and cold snowy forest. And I discovered a huge gap in my planning. I do have a story outline; and there are key plot points that are well defined, but there are some important elements that I thought I'd be able to just create on the fly and I can't. :-/
Unfortunately, the subsequent parts of the novel strongly relies on me knowing what these key plot points are--I can't skip them. So my novel writing came to a screeching halt.
What did I do? I started off doing some free writing. I wrote the beginning of a scene for a romance short story (I don't write romance, but I did do one for our upcoming romance anthology (The Love Anthology)). I started a few other stories in other genres. And then I hit upon a possible path forward. I couldn't make progress on my planned novel, but I could write some important scenes of its prequel. Suddenly, the story is flowing again and these will help develop more of the novel's background that will help immeasurably when I take it up again.
So: has this happened to others? What wasthe strategy you used?
I'm still writing mine (well, actually tonight I'm just doing work work :-( (taking a brief break) but I plan to cross 50K tomorrow) but my novel hit a hard wall around 44K, the first time in years that that has happened for me.
You remember in the Lord of the Rings Return of the King how Frodo, Sam and Gollum go wandering around the grey and desolate landscape going to Mordor? They travel on and on and on... it's definitely not my favorite part of the trilogy.
My band of stuffed animals are doing something similar, wandering across a desolate and cold snowy forest. And I discovered a huge gap in my planning. I do have a story outline; and there are key plot points that are well defined, but there are some important elements that I thought I'd be able to just create on the fly and I can't. :-/
Unfortunately, the subsequent parts of the novel strongly relies on me knowing what these key plot points are--I can't skip them. So my novel writing came to a screeching halt.
What did I do? I started off doing some free writing. I wrote the beginning of a scene for a romance short story (I don't write romance, but I did do one for our upcoming romance anthology (The Love Anthology)). I started a few other stories in other genres. And then I hit upon a possible path forward. I couldn't make progress on my planned novel, but I could write some important scenes of its prequel. Suddenly, the story is flowing again and these will help develop more of the novel's background that will help immeasurably when I take it up again.
So: has this happened to others? What wasthe strategy you used?