SEO title: Stuck at Chapter Three? How to Keep Your Novel Moving Meta description: The opening chapters of a novel pour out, and then the draft stalls the moment the set-up is done. Here is why, and the habits that keep it moving to the last page. Picture: pictures/blank-page.webp (alt text: A woman at a kitchen table at night, chin on her hand, staring at a blank laptop screen beside crumpled paper) ============================================================ Get Your First Novel Past Chapter Three and Keep the Draft Moving to the End This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you buy through my link, at no extra cost to you. Picture a file called Chapter Three that has been open on a laptop for nine days, with the cursor blinking after the same half-finished sentence. Chapter three is where a first draft gets hard: the opening chapters pour out, and the moment the set-up is done, the story stalls. The stall has very little to do with talent, and once you can see what is going on at that point in a book, you can write straight through it. The excitement of a new idea runs out at about the same place every time A new story idea comes with its own fuel. You can see the opening scene, you know who your main character is, and the first pages come easily because you have been playing them in your head for weeks. That fuel covers the setup. It gets your character through her normal life and up to the moment where something goes wrong. Then chapter three asks a harder question. Now that something has gone wrong, what does she do about it, and what happens after that? If you never worked out the answer, the writing slows to a crawl. Every sentence takes ages because you are inventing the story and writing it at the same moment, and doing both at once wears anyone out. Going back to polish chapter one feels like progress, and it quietly stops the book When the road ahead gets foggy, most writers turn around. They open chapter one and start fixing it, because chapter one feels safe. The story is already there, and all you have to do is make the sentences nicer. A week later the opening is lovely and chapter three still has the same blinking cursor. This loop is so common that many writing teachers give the same rule for it: no going back until the draft is finished. If you think of something you want to change in an early chapter, drop a note in square brackets right where you are, like [make her sister older in chapter one], and keep writing. Your opening will need rewriting anyway. You can only know what chapter one should set up once you know how the book ends, so every hour spent polishing it now is an hour you will spend again later. Writer's block in the middle of a book is usually a missing plan for the next scene Writer's block sounds like a mystery, as if the words dried up for no reason. In the middle of a novel it nearly always has a simple cause: you don't know what happens next, so there is nothing for the words to describe. So stop staring at the page and plan the next scene in a few rough lines. Ask what your main character wants in this scene, who or what is in her way, and how the scene ends. Write the answers down before you write a single line of the chapter. A few more habits keep a draft rolling once it is moving: - Finish each writing session partway through a scene you know how to complete. Ernest Hemingway liked to stop for the day when he still knew what was going to happen next, so the next morning started easily. - Keep a running page of ideas for later chapters, so a good idea never drags you away from the scene you are on. - Set a small daily word count you can hit even on a bad day, and count the days you hit it. Lindsay Lake spent years stuck in the first few chapters Lindsay Lake, a romance novelist who now coaches other writers, describes this stage of her own life in a way a lot of writers will recognise. Before she became a novelist, she says, "Just getting past the first few chapters was like a never ending struggle." In her words, she would "spend my evenings writing, rewriting, editing and losing my patience," and "starting over became my painful routine." Then her husband left, and she was suddenly raising her three children alone. She says that after months of barely coping, she set out to learn what it really took to write fiction, studied how successful authors work, and pieced together a method of her own. Lindsay says she then wrote her first novel in 14 days, and that ten weeks later it was climbing the charts. Her best-known book is Private Seduction, part of her Hideaway of Desires romance series, and as a contract writer she says she has written over 50 more books under pen names. Her sales letter puts it as "in as little as 14 days," and she is the first to say that how long your book takes depends on your goals and the genre you write in. Her names for getting past the stall: the Clarity Momentum Formula and the Tidal Wave Technique Two parts of Lindsay Lake's Hurricane Method (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written), her program for writing a full novel, are aimed right at this kind of stall. The first is what she calls the Clarity Momentum Formula. On her sales page she says it "destroys writers block once and for all" and clears your mind, so the words flow from your thoughts as you write. The second is her Tidal Wave Technique, for the moment you "hit a wall in your story that you just can't get past." She says it floods you with ideas to move the story forward, so you know where your story and characters are heading. She lays out how each one works, step by step, inside the program. The Hurricane Method costs $47 as a single payment, with a 60-day money-back guarantee, and Lindsay describes the Clarity Momentum Formula on her sales page (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written). Before you read any further, though, there's tonight's job: plan your next scene in a few rough lines, then write it straight through without opening chapter one.