You may now be reaching that point in your novel where you’re starting to lose your grip on all the various plot strings you’ve been holding onto since November 1st. Metaphorically speaking, it’s like you’re holding onto a bouquet of helium balloons and trying desperately not to drop any of the strings before you have to hand the balloons over to someone else. But, what happens when you get to a point when you can’t remember where you were taking those friggin’ balloons? Or what if you know where you’re taking them, but can’t remember how exactly to get there?

Oh, hi! Plot block! This is where all those beautiful color-coded outlines you drew up back in October do you no damned good because your characters aren’t who you thought they would be, or you had to make some major change early on because what you originally was going to write just didn’t work for whatever reason (examples: a plot component is illegal, disobeys known laws of physics, or relies too much on suspension of disbelief.)

So, whadda ya do when you’re trying to crank out 1,666 words and can’t get over the hump? Come closer and let me whisper it to you.

In case you couldn’t hear me, here’s a transcript: skip the hump.

Yep. I’m giving you permission. If anyone calls you on it, tell them to take it up with Holley Trent. If the hump is giving you fits, quit trying to ram into it with your keyboard. Take a little literary walk right around the damned thing, (skip and throw rose petals as you pass it if you’d like), and write the end of the story. Then, after you’ve written those scenes that follow the climax, don’t go back to the gap. I don’t care how much it’s taunting you. You’re trying to crank out words, remember? Go back to page one and start identifying, tidying, removing, or improving subplots and major thematic movements.

Just trust me on this. Not only are you going to find and fix some things that no longer make sense in your story, but by the time you make it back to the gap you’ll have figured out what bit of the story was missing and needed to be told there AND you’ll have added a bunch of words to your story. Works for me every single time.

I’ve actually had to utilize this coping strategy for the past bunch of novels I’ve written. It’s easy to hit 50,000 words in a novel you think will end up with 85,000, but if you’re writing category length fiction (50k-60k words), your hump may come at 35k in as opposed to, oh, 55k in. In the work I contracted to Lyrical Press, Saint and Scholar, I had a big gaping plot hole just before the climax because my characters personalities had blossomed in a way I hadn’t predicted. So, I skipped ahead and wrote the “happily ever after” bit. That unlocked something in my brain. I started asking myself: “If that’s where they’re going to be, what little things happened to get them there that I didn’t explain well enough?”

I went back to Chapter One and started tweaking Carla and Grant’s back-stories to fit the people they had become mid-story. I molded the conflict so the ending didn’t have a resolution that came too easily.

Saint and Scholar is a 50,000-word story I finished in a total of one month (including requested revisions).

You can write a full, satisfying story in one month, I promise you. You can do it again and again. My 11/26 Crimson Romance novel My Nora took me two weeks (not including requested technical revisions). I wrote Polished Slick in a month.

You don’t have to know where your story is going. Give yourself permission to skip forward and go backward while you’re writing. Revisions happen in a straight line: not first drafts. 1,666 words. You can do it, even when you hit the hump.

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Holley Trent writes sassy sensual romances set in Eastern North Carolina. She haunts Twitter regularly, but when she’s not there, you can probably find her navel gazing at her blog.