I’m in a stuck moment with my latest short story, “Things.” (This will hopefully not be its finished title, but it’s what I’ve got right now.)

When I get stuck, I sometimes try to write a bunch of different “Next lines” to see if any of them get me unstuck. Here are the ones I wrote the other day:

  1. The fighting pit smelled like wet straw and blood.
  2.  The first drink was always the hardest.
  3. Only the nosebleed seats were sold to the public. The rest were reserved.
  4. The blood inside his body burned hot; his muscles hardened like tempered steel.
  5. Jora hated the streets during the Thing.
  6.  “Odin, All-Father, grant me a good defeat.”

I’m not sure if I like any of these, or if they’re the right “next line” in the story, but I think a few of them could be the start of other scenes/sequences in the narrative. If nothing else, this exercise allows me to see various paths for the story to take. Even if I take none of these particular paths, the very fact that these paths *could* exist is helpful for me. It lets me know that the story is fluid, and that there isn’t necessarily a wrong choice, just different choices.