Stood at a writing desk in a Portland coffee shop for 3 hours and finally cracked my plot hole

I was working on a fantasy novel and got stuck on how my main character would escape a fortress. For like two weeks I kept trying to force a big magic solution but nothing clicked. Then last Saturday I went to this tiny coffee shop on Hawthorne and did the whole thing standing up at their high top bar. Something about being on my feet and watching people walk by made me think of a simple lock picking scene instead. I wrote out the whole sequence in about 45 minutes after that. Has anyone else had a weird location or tiny change to your routine suddenly fix a writing problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason36128d ago

Honestly I don't buy that standing up was the secret sauce. It sounds more like you finally let your brain relax after two weeks of forcing the magic solution. The coffee shop and the people watching probably helped you stop thinking so hard. The lock picking idea was probably already kicking around in your head you just needed to stop wrestling with the big flashy answer. I've had that happen too but it was just me giving up and taking a shower not some standing desk breakthrough.

tessa_roberts128d ago

My buddy Dave had the same thing happen but way weirder. He was stuck on a scene in his screenplay for like a month, couldn't figure out how two characters would meet. He drove to the hardware store to get a new drain snake for a job I needed help with and while he was waiting in line he looked at this display of zip ties and suddenly wrote the whole conversation in his phone notes app. The zip ties had nothing to do with the scene at all, it was just the random boring setting that finally unlocked his brain. He said he stopped trying to be clever and just let the simple idea come to him. Funny how your head works when you quit squeezing it so hard.