A while ago I found myself stuck on a scene in a novel I'm working on. I’m somewhere in that spectrum between planner and pantser, so I had written an outline; but somehow my outlines rarely survive contact with my drafts. It’s like my characters get stage fright; they freeze in place until I can give them the right cues. But this time I couldn’t get them to budge. I have a few strategies for when the wheels get stuck: rethinking the scene from scratch, changing up which characters are in the room, cutting the scene out entirely, etc. But I had recently encountered a piece of writing advice on Tumblr that seemed worth a try. “Let your story be bad for a day. Aggressively bad.” I hoped writing a terrible draft would help me get past that unreasonable desire to write the scene perfectly the first time. Or at least serve as a placeholder so I could move on with the book and come back later. So, I decided to give it a try. And it was horribly, horrendously, nail-bitingly, gloriously ba...
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