Don't Know What To Write Next in Your Story?

Twelve questions to help you write on that scary blank page

We’ve all been there! The decks and the diary are clear, the coffee has brewed, the dog and the ancient parent are asleep, you sit down to a writing stint, and … have no idea what to write next.

If you’re thinking at this point, ‘Well, what do you expect if you don’t plan?’ I promise you that even the most assiduous planners get stuck in this way. And, as ever, the planner’s pre-first-draft puzzlements, and the panster’s grappling with mid-draft problems, actually use the same imaginative engines, so all of what follows may be helpful at either stage.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The thing is, you might know perfectly well that the answer to, ‘What happens next?’ is ‘She escapes’ or ‘He paints his breakthrough picture’, but not know the chain of micro events that result in that macro event.

Or you might know how it happens - she picks the lock with her fork, or in posing the model he realises they look like a wolf - but not have a clue what the actual next sentence should be.

Or you may be able to write a next sentence or two, but not be able to trust it will lead to the next scene, and the next part of the story.

If you don’t know what the next sentence needs to be, you can’t know what the one after that will be - so maybe you should go back and fiddle with existing words instead? Or maybe the wheelie bins are due for a scrub? (True example! More on procrastination here.) While for all sorts of writers, the Thirty-Thousand Doldrums are a genuine thing; more here.

Luckily, questions are also your salvation. Sure, you can make a head-on demand that the easily-scared wild creature which is your creative imagination produce the goods, but the risk is that instead you put it to flight.

Instead, take time instead to think up the most helpful question, then keep on asking the questions it gives rise to. This way, you approach your imagination obliquely and quietly - and if you persist some kind of answer will come up, and you’re on your way.

As your imagination starts to move, don’t be forget to make any ‘sidecar’ notes about what this thinking suggests for elsewhere in the story - but don’t let your mind scamper off after them: log them and keep going.

1) Do you know what happens next?

1. Yes - but I don’t know how to write it.

   1. Is it the moment for covering-the-ground, moving-on-to-the-next-important-scene narration? Try writing that in far-out psychic distance.

   2. Is it the moment for a close-in evocation of a specific, immediate moment, close-in in psychic distance? You can always change the distance later

   3. Ask yourself which character(s) are the centre of the next scene. Reverse back to the last time we saw them, and ask yourself what they were doing/thinking/feeling then, which would make them act now.

   4. If you can’t figure that out, ask yourself why you can’t. (Clue: the answer is probably that their character arc isn’t fully-enough developed yet).

   5. Would a different point-of-view, or centering the next scene on a different character, break things open? Try some thought experiments to explore the possibilities.

   6. Would a different setting for essentially the same scene offer more pressures, tensions, choices and dilemmas, or simply a more exciting atmosphere - and therefore more drama?

   7. Is what happens next the right thing to be happening for the story? Ask, ‘Why this? Why here? Why now?’. Then check if different events would answer those questions more satisfactorily.

2. No, but I know one thing which happens further on

   1. Let’s call this the Next Known Thing (NKT). Peer ahead from Current Thing (CT) which you’ve just written, to that point in the story.

   2. What could happen at NKT-minus-one?

   3. What could happen at CT-plus-one?

   4. And at NKT-minus-two? And at CT-plus-two? NKT-minus-three? CT-plus-three?

   5. Nibble inwards like this from CT and NKT until you have a chain which meets in the middle.

3. No, I know nothing:

   1. Stand back and ask yourself about what’s just happened to your character. Where are they (physically, psychologically, emotionally) now? What do they need to do next? What do they want to do next? Are those different?

   2. Given who they are, what external or internal pressures would get in the way of them doing what they want? And in the way of what they need?

   3. Given all that, what might they actually do? Call that CT-plus-one and, if you feel sure enough of it, write that section.

   4. If you don’t feel sure enough, imagine onwards to CT-plus-two and maybe CT-plus-three, until they start to confirm each other, the way tentative crossword guesses start to confirm each other towards certainty.

   5. If you keep on coming up with ‘I don’t know’, take a couple of steps further backwards in your story - CT-minus-two, CT-minus-three or whatever - till you come to the last thing you do feel solid and confident about, then work forwards again.

2) Would switching out of writing prose, into ‘imagining on paper’, help?

Sometimes you don’t know what to write because your sense of this world of people and settings isn’t full enough, so it’s too soon to ask your mind to come up with the causal chain of events that emerges through connected sentences of storytelling.

Instead, switch to other forms of ‘imagining on paper’, such as:

• family trees; relationship trees showing power-structures and tensions

• sketch-maps and building-plans

• bullet-points of the stages of a possible scene

• a sketch-map of a character arc, or a ‘fortunately-unfortunately’ zig-zag

• spider-diagrams of ideas and themes

• free-writing of a character’s voice, or of a pen-portrait

If your imagination balks at producing new things at all, start by jotting down things you already know, and extend from there in mini-steps.

Remember that all of this is ‘in pencil’: this isn’t ‘planning’ of things you’ll have to stick to, this is just free-form imagining.

3) Do you keep ending up in cul-de-sacs?

All these exploratory processes are bound to lead you down some blind alleys, but if it keeps happening and you never even get glimpses of possible other routes, you could ask yourself why that might be.

• Have you forgotten ‘Don’t get it right, get it written (for now)’? Accepting that this next bit may be more like a Zero Draft than a fully-functioning instalment of plot may be all it takes to switch off the Inner Critic or Inner Cowardly Editor. They are trying to protect you from going down a blind alley but, ironically, they keeps declaring things are blind alleys before your imagination has had a chance to work freely and fully, and maybe discover that an apparent cul-de-sac is actually a route to something good.

• Does your writing self think more easily in terms of specifics, or in terms of structure? Check in with that link, then consider whether questions about specifics and details, or structures and engineering, are more ikely to help your imagination works more easily. And which questions feel uncomfortable?

  • Then consider if this is the moment for

    • going with the flow within your comfort-zone process and postponing the other kind of thinking till you know more

    • or keeping a firm hand on the tiller to steer straight out into the scarier waters of your discomfort zone.

• Do ideas come along but they’re all unsuitable? Ask yourself

  • Is some part of your mind censoring them? If so, why? Consider the reason for each seeming unsuitable: is there a common theme? What would happen if you stopped caring about that reason?

  • Is anything that you reckon you must stick to in fact a ‘darling’ that needs murdering?

• Is this is a part of a larger, longer-term blockage? Try my post about Writer’s Block.

• Is everything not all right and you are not OK in your relationship to your writing life and creative hopes and dreams? Sometimes the inability to think of what happens next in your story is the product of something more awry in the rest of life, which this post can help with.