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:
- The fighting pit smelled like wet straw and blood.
- The first drink was always the hardest.
- Only the nosebleed seats were sold to the public. The rest were reserved.
- The blood inside his body burned hot; his muscles hardened like tempered steel.
- Jora hated the streets during the Thing.
- “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.
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