Stuck!!

Following my policy of posting while it's hot and I'm doing it, yes, I'm stuck. I'm now two-thirds into the story, am aware that the pace needs to go hell for leather as of now, am sure lots of earlier stuff is flabby, and don't know how on earth to get myself through the next 30K words.

So what can I do? Sleep on it and hope the next twist of plot pops into my head. Done it, didn't work. Not yet, anyway. What else? I can do a readthrough from the top and hope to revitalise the story and know what is needed. But will I get caught up in wanting to edit or will I be able to treat it as first draft and let it alone? The solution to that one is to write in comment balloons as I go that I can come back to on the edit.

I can also puzzle over the plot ad infinitum, looking at all my notes and jottings and try to work out what should go in where and how. Some people do this with post-it notes successfully, setting down plot points and shifting them about like a storyboard until they're happy.

I can leave the whole thing for a few days, moan about having a treacle book, do something else and hope it all gels when I get back to it after a break. But I'm horribly conscious that it's taken so long already and I really want to get to the end of this, plus this is a writing day and I've got stuff on for the next three days that will probably rob me of any writing time.

Or - and this is probably what I will do - I can just write through it. But how can I do that when I have no idea where the plot is going or what comes next? Well, it's another trust the writer within moment. I've got a stack of what-needs-to-happen items I wrote up when I discovered I was stuck. I'll just pick one at random, start a scene to create it and just write.

See, it doesn't really matter. Somewhere deep in the depths of my experienced writing persona I know that I do know what has to happen. I just don't have it right here in the front of my mind. So I have to spring it somehow, that's all.

My advice to myself? Write on, Liz. Just write on. Trust your inner writer, because she knows.