One of my friends sent me a new tee shirt and I love it!

And bonus: it got me through an ugly chunk of writer’s block. Hear me out.

I got stuck in a part of my story that just seemed…dull. Plodding. Predictable. This is supposed to be an epic story, for creep’s sake. Epically dull is not something people generally pay money for.

So I opened up my package and saw my shirt and laughed out loud because my friend knows me too well. And then I got an idea.

What if my protagonist made a bad choice? Instead of the choice that lead to the heroic resolution, I mean. It would cause some serious tension, force a reroute of the story into interesting new channels as they have to (a) do damage control and (b) figure out the right choice, and just generally lit a fire under my brain by taking it someplace new to play.

So simple, but so overlooked so often. Sometimes you have to ask yourself – what if everything went wrong on the way to right? What if it’s all their fault? What if they did something really, really stupid?

And once you’re done asking the questions, you put on your big girl shirt, and you write.