6.919. Moving On from Minutiae

Give me a writer who never got stuck on a singular plot point or cleverly worded line or some other minutiae and I will give you a writer who never wrote anything they gave a damn about. We get stuck. We get stuck because we need to get it right. Unfortunately that can be a mental bomb. I’m talking nuclear reaction here. Scorched earth until we get it exactly the way we want it.

Or maybe we just move on.

Keep it moving. That’s the motto for the day. When you get stuck on a small piece that matters a lot to you, mark it with XXX or highlight the section in another color–I like blue, personally, and keep on keeping on. If you don’t you’re going to die on that sentence. I know this because I’ve done it multiple times. I killed four novels in exactly this fashion. Four. I’d get to a point and I would just get stuck. Then the entire thing would unravel. This is the entire reason I have yet to publish a fantasy novel (three of the four were fantasy). So, please take my advice and move on from the problem. Come back to it later down the road and you may realize that the problem worked itself out in the writing.

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