Wisdomous Wednesday: Stop in the Middle of
Jun 29, 2011 
Wisdomous Wednesday is a weekly series of posts with advice about writing ranging from craft to navigation through the publishing world. If you have some wisdomous thoughts you’d like to share here, don’t hesitate to contact me. I love advice from other writers!
I think one of the hardest things about writing is getting started. There’s something about the blank page that is pretty scary–not in an “it’s gonna eat my face” way, but in a “now you have to prove things” way, and a “everyone’s expecting you to be awesome” way. Even harder than getting started at the beginning is getting started on a new scene after stopping a project for a while. You don’t have the excitement of first lines and unlimited potential to get you going.
Today’s advice is, yet again, for people who struggle to keep momentum on projects from “Once upon a time” until “and they lived happily ever after.” (Can you tell that that used to be my biggest problem? I have about thirty ways to help with it.)
Stop Writing in the Middle of a Scene
It’s pretty simple. Instead of getting to the end of your chapter or the end of your scene and stopping there for the day, find the most exciting part of what you’re writing and stop there. Even if you’re ACHING to keep going. If you know you’re going to stop in the next half hour or so, just quit when it’s super exciting. (Here I use “exciting” not necessarily to mean action scenes, but just something you’re really enjoying writing something, whether it’s a romantic scene, an action scene, a description you’ve been dying to write, etc.) You’ll come back to it the next day and want to dive right in, rather than sit there staring at the next chapter title going “Okay, now what?”
My favorite side effect of this is that when you stop in the middle of a scene you’re really into, your brain will stay with it and keep turning it over, even subconsciously. More ideas will flow even when you’re away from your project, keeping you eager to return to it and possibly even offering paths forward in the manuscript that you hadn’t thought of before.
Some writers take this so far as to stop mid-sentence. I tend to find that a bit frustrating, myself, as I can never remember what the second half of the sentence was supposed to be. And I always believe it was going to be something TOTALLY BRILLIANT, if only I could just remember what I was thinking. But try it both ways and see what works best for you!
Today’s advice comes via the man himself, Ernest Hemingway. He said: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck … That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”
Typical. I spend five hundred words trying to explain it and he does it in a few sentences. Some day I’ll learn to be concise!
But just, you know. Not today.
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I’ve tried to do this thing, but whenever I come back to my story, I tend to forget what I was meant to write, and what I was trying to get across and yeah. :-/
It helps if you’re writing every day–harder to forget in the span of one day! But yeah, I have had moments where I forget what I was meant to be doing. I think for me, though, the moments that I’m sitting there not knowing how to get started on a new scene outweigh the moments I’ve forgotten where I was going.
I like the title of this post. I see what you did there! 😛
I’ve tried stopping in the middle of an exciting scene, but I hate leaving things unfinished, and by the next day I’ve usually forgotten where I was going. Maybe this works for people with slightly better memories.
Hah, thanks! I was a bit worried people would just think I was sloppy, so good to know it wasn’t a total miss. 😉
This usually works best for me when it’s a scene that I’ve been looking forward to writing for a long time, so I’m really familiar with what I want to do with it. But yeah, it’s definitely not going to work with everyone’s styles!
I tend to stop in the middle of a scene, and scrawl a few lines to myself to remind myself where I was going with it. Sometimes it even works 🙂
Ooh, I love the idea of writing a little reminder when you stop, to help pick it back up again next day! I’m definitely gonna try that.
This is great advice! I know another writer who writes early in the morning before work. To get her brain going, the night before, she will write the first sentences of the next morning’s work. It was added motivation to get up early. It’s like a writing cliffhanger for your brain!
I hate stopping in the middle of a sentence, too. I always forget what I was going to write next! But really great advice about stopping in the middle of a scene!
Great advice…
During composing I never lack motivation or words to put on paper… now revision, it sucks the life out of me, probably because I am a weak writer and I struggle to learn how to make it right while I revise.