Day 131 – When you get stuck in a scene

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The Writer’s Block Breakthrough: Why Writing Nonsense is Your Secret Weapon

We’ve all been there. You’re deep into a scene, the momentum is building, and suddenly—thud. The cursor blinks at you with rhythmic, mocking indifference. You’ve hit a wall. Your characters have gone silent, the plot has evaporated, and you’re convinced that your creative well has officially run dry.

The instinct in that moment is to stop. You lean back, close your laptop, and decide to “wait for inspiration.”

Don’t do it.

Stopping is the death of flow. The longer you sit in the silence, the harder it becomes to jump back into the world you’ve built. If you find yourself stuck, here is the golden rule of professional writing: Write nonsense.

Embrace the “Placeholder Phase”

When you get stuck, your internal editor is usually to blame. That nagging voice in your head that says, “That’s not good enough,” or “This dialogue makes no sense.”

Silence that voice by giving it something to chew on. If you don’t know what your protagonist should say next, write: [They have a really intense argument here about the secret map, but I don’t know what the secret is yet, so they just yell about apples for a paragraph.]

Seriously. Write that.

By putting the “nonsense” on the page, you are tricking your brain. You are telling your subconscious that the scene isn’t finished—it’s just in a “drafting phase.” You are keeping the momentum alive. You are maintaining the rhythm of your writing habit.

Keep Moving at All Costs

Think of your story like a car. If you stop the engine every time you come to a challenging stretch of road, you’ll never reach your destination. If you keep idling, you’ll be ready to accelerate the moment the path clears.

When you write nonsense, you aren’t just filling space; you’re staying in the zone. You’re keeping the “writer’s muscles” warm. It’s much easier to turn “nonsense about apples” into “a gripping revelation about a map” when you are already sitting in the chair, typing away, than it is to start from a cold, blank page.

Trust the Process (It Will Come)

The magic of writing isn’t that we have all the answers from the start; it’s that we find them through the act of doing.

Often, those nonsense placeholders turn into something brilliant by sheer accident. Perhaps while writing about those absurd apples, you realise why your character is so desperate to hide the truth. You might stumble upon a perfect metaphor, a sudden character motivation, or a plot twist you hadn’t planned.

If you hadn’t kept moving, you never would have reached that discovery.

The Takeaway: Just Get Words on the Page

Perfection is the enemy of progress. You cannot edit a blank page, and you certainly cannot find inspiration by waiting for it to strike from the heavens.

So, next time you hit that dreaded wall:

1. Acknowledge the block.
2. Accept that the next few sentences might be utter garbage.
3. Write them anyway.

Get the words on the page. Keep the momentum moving. Trust that the story is in there, waiting for you to clear the path. Your future self—the one holding a finished draft—will thank you for it.