There are many moments in the life of every novel, when the thought of trying to write feels like this:

You know that the ideas you need are somewhere in the murky depths of your brain, but now, they’re stubbornly, and persistently, refusing to surface. Frustration with your own uselessness starts to build, till you’re feeling like this:

Here are a few things I’ve found useful for navigating around writers block:

Write whatever excites you

The writing gods have bestowed upon you the kernel of an awesome idea – a Viking ship! Trapped in a frozen fjord! Overrun by zombies! You’ve breathlessly begun penning the scene-setting opening chapters, but now, you have no idea how to get your Viking from the tavern in Gokstad to the fateful encounter with the Longship? Leave that bit aside for now. Don’t save up the writing you’re passionate about in order to fill in first-draft plot holes, or while you figure out the geography of a fjord. Maybe you’re desperate to write the big romantic resolution, or the epic battle scene, or maybe you’re dying to use this one great line that you know belongs in the last chapter. Write whatever elicits an emotion. Write whatever scene or piece of scene or sliver of dialogue you feel like writing right at that moment. Write whatever makes you want to return to the pages of your world, whatever motivates you to keep on going, in whatever order that happens to be in. Keep in mind that when you are genuinely stuck, sometimes you need to jump ahead in order to figure out what goes before…

[For the month of June, I will be writer-in-resident at the fab Inside a Dog – you can read the rest of this post here]