September 16, 2026 Post by : Editorial Practical Advice

Every writer has one. The scene you keep circling around without landing on. Maybe it is the confrontation between two characters you love. Maybe it is the death, the goodbye, the confession, the moment when everything the story has been building toward finally has to happen. You open the document, you read the pages before it, and then you find a reason to work on something else. A different chapter. A character sketch. The outline you already finished twice.

Avoidance is not a character flaw. It is information. The scenes we skip are almost always the scenes that carry the most weight, and weight is uncomfortable to hold. But here is the thing: a story is only as strong as the scenes you were afraid to write. If you leave them out, readers feel the absence even if they cannot name it.

Why We Avoid Certain Scenes

Sometimes we avoid a scene because we do not yet know how it should go. The emotional logic has not resolved. We are not sure what the character would actually say, and writing the wrong version feels worse than writing nothing. This is the most common reason, and it is usually solved by writing the wrong version anyway. A bad draft of a difficult scene teaches you more than a month of thinking about it.

Other times, we avoid a scene because it costs us something. It requires us to access an emotion we would rather not visit, or to write a character doing something we find genuinely hard to forgive. The page is not therapy, but it is not immune to the writer's interior life either. Naming what the scene costs you is often the first step toward writing it.

And sometimes we avoid a scene because we are afraid it will not be good enough. This is the most seductive fear because it sounds like standards. It is not. It is just fear wearing a nicer coat.

How to Actually Write It

Lower the stakes. Tell yourself you are writing a placeholder. Write the scene in summary first, in a few plain sentences, just to get the shape of it on the page. You are not committing to prose. You are committing to presence.

Write it badly on purpose. Give yourself permission to produce something embarrassing. The goal is to break the seal, not to nail it. Most difficult scenes get better in revision, but they cannot be revised until they exist.

Change the point of view. If the scene is too hot to write from one character's perspective, try it from another's. Sometimes the distance of a secondary character makes the moment writable.

And finally, give yourself a landing. Know what comes after the scene before you start it. Having a place to go when the hard part is done makes it easier to walk into the hard part at all.

The scene you are avoiding is not a wall. It is a door. And on the other side is the story you actually meant to tell.

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