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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20098
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Lauren Ipsum has some great ideas to start with, and sometimes it just takes thinking more conceptually about the story to kick through.

For instance, do you know _conceptually_ what you want to happen next? That is, let's say your protagonist is in a bank but the next thing you have an idea for is him getting on a plane. Conceptually, you know you need a series of bridging scenes getting the protagonist from the bank to the airport, and along the way there's a zombie outbreak which makes the trip more difficult, or there's a fire raging in the only tunnel from the bank's part of town to the airport feeder bypass, or a there's a bomb on the plane and he has to get there before it goes off somehow...

...you get the idea.

But if you _don't_ know conceptually what you want to happen next, but you do have ideas for later in the book, then you can simply write the ideas that come later.

Try not to get trapped in the time line of your story. That is, don't worry about getting the story onto the page in the order the reader will experience it; you're the omnipotent writer of the story, and you are not bound by its time line. So, write what comes next - whether that's what the reader will experience next when they read the story is irrelevant.

What happens is, writing the next thing can kick things loose in your brain. When you have the next idea down, it might become clear what has to happen to get the story from where you got stuck to the next thing you wrote. But even if it doesn't, you just keep going. You can go back at any time to fill the gaps, to add foreshadowing, to add plants and clues and subtext.

Think movies - TONS of movies are filmed out of sequence with how we see them in their final form. Writing can be the same. Just write what comes to you next. _That's_ the next thing.

Don't let yourself get bogged down by the linear progress of the story. You're not bound by that as the writer; write what you see next, what the next thing is, irrespective of the place in the story's time line. It doesn't have to be what the reader sees next, only what you do.

I know, that was a long-winded raving explanation and I'm sorry, but hopefully that will give you some boost.

Now, to piggyback on Lauren Ispum's idea, I recommend Algis Budrys's 7-point plot system. You need, in the beginning section of the story:

1. A Character
2. In a context (setting)
3. With a problem

If you have those three things, then the next step in the story is for the character (and any allies) make a logical but erroneous attempt to solve the problem, which nets failure. That failure is both unexpected and educational - they learn more about the problem. This leads to another attempt to solve the problem which nets failure, costs more, but also exposes more of the true problem. One more attempt/fail, and that leads to the final push, the give-it-all effort of the protagonist(s) which will either net victory, finally, or final failure up to and including death.

So with that in mind, you can place the ideas you have on the spine Lauren Ipsum spoke of, and discover what's missing. It's the same method LI described, but with a different plotting device.

Hope that helps some!

Original score: 3