Today I was working on ‘The Workers’. About mid-afternoon I hit a huge impasse. I just couldn’t get passed a plot point. I was trying to type and the words just weren’t coming. I doubted the conflict in the story, the tension, I couldn’t find something that was really appealing for the reader. So I stopped, a little disillusioned.

Then I swapped to something else. To another story, ‘Network’, that I’ve been tinkering with this week. It’s dialogue rich and as I started to look at it the keyboard came alive again. I had characters talking, arguing, trying to lead each other one way and the other. I must have written between 500 and 1000 words within two hours. My fingers were running hot. Tonight I cracked on and wrote another two scenes. Out of nowhere this story’s now almost finished!

Wow, I thought! That felt great.

That’s the fun of short stories. If you get stuck, you can just shift to another, and find yourself totally energised again. All the while in the back of your mind ideas are fermenting. So when you go back to the one that blocked you, you may have found that thing that got you stuck the last time. The mind’s funny like that, it just keeps on clicking away even when you think your attention is on something completely different. So, I’m finishing the day feeling good, inspired, a contender.