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My fantasy novel died when I wrote myself into a corner during chapter 14
I was working on a story about a blacksmith who finds a magical anvil, and everything was going great for about 30 pages. Then in chapter 14, I had the blacksmith discover the anvil could talk, but I had no idea what it should say or how it fit into the plot. I spent a whole weekend staring at the same paragraph and deleting and retyping words. Eventually I tried a trick where I wrote a fake dialogue between the blacksmith and the anvil just for fun, with no pressure to keep it. That turned into the whole next arc and saved the project. Has anyone else hit a wall like that and found a weird way around it?
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the_thomas11d ago
Do I count the three months I spent arguing with a cat about a missing subplot?
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Dude the fake dialogue trick is actually genius. I hit the same wall with a side character who was supposed to deliver a letter but I had no idea why. Ended up writing a stupid argument between him and his horse just to kill time and somehow the horse became the comic relief for the whole second half. Sometimes you gotta let the dumb stuff happen to break the logjam.
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