on Fiction University:

Don’t try to write the whole scene at once.

Last week, I was having a bit of trouble writing a scene for a new book. I’d been away from writing in general, and this book in particular for a while, so I was no longer in the writing flow. I had my outline summary, I knew what the scene entailed, I just couldn’t start it. So I did what I always do when a scene doesn’t want to start.

I took my summary and turned it into the individual moments that made up the scene.

This is as easy as just hitting a hard return after a line, and turning my summary into something closer to bullet points. That let me focus on smaller moments in the scene, and not the entire thing. I didn’t have to worry about the end, because I was working on the little bit at the start.

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