Yep, it’s official, I’m procrastinating adding a chapter. I can’t seem to see the scenes in my head and every time I try and write it, it sounds artificial and stiff. I know the scenes need to be added or the story will come to a screeching halt, but as an organic writer, I’m struggling with forcing it.
So, I decided to procrastinate a little more and throw these questions out to blogland. Do you ever struggle with this? And if so do you force it? If that’s a yes, did it turn out well, or did it require lots of revisions?
For now, I’m going to skip this chapter and work on the others until it comes naturally, or until it becomes necessary or enough people let me know that forcing it works.
Having this same problem, I do what you are doing. I put the challenging chapter on simmer and let it brew in my mind while I go on with other chapters and editing. When a thought or phase cames, I would physically write it into my troublesome chapter, so it can brew with the rest of my thoughts on it.
One time I had a truly difficult chapter to write, I stumbled and stumbled and finally shared my thoughts with a friend and listened to her comments. I ended up throwing that chapter out and went through an unplanned writing detour.
I rewrote a completely different chapter (same characters, but different places and events) to replace it, careful to pick up hanging threads of the story to weave in. And in some of the future chapters, I did have to add a sentence here and there to complete the weave of any storyline that detour chapter newly presented. However, overall, my completed book was much stronger
with the detour chapter than with the original one planned.
Thanks for that insight, maybe that is what I need to do, brainstorm with a friend.