"If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind"
About this Quote
Writer's block gets demystified here: not a mystical drought, but a systems error. Sarah Zettel frames getting stuck as a diagnostic signal that the story's world model is underbuilt. If the characters won't move, it's because the author hasn't supplied them with enough internal physics to push against. That practical bluntness is the intent: replace romantic notions of inspiration with craft logic.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that you can "plot your way out" of any dead end. Zettel points to a different bottleneck: insufficient specificity. "Some aspect of the story or the characters" is tellingly vague, because the blockage can hide anywhere - a character's unexamined fear, a missing social rule, an economic constraint, the geography of a room. When those constraints are absent, scenes become weightless; nothing forces a choice, so nothing happens. Research and background notes aren't busywork in this view, they're pressure. They create limits, and limits create narrative.
Context matters: Zettel comes out of science fiction and fantasy traditions where worldbuilding isn't garnish, it's infrastructure. Her advice reads like a genre veteran's corrective to the "just write" mantra. She isn't advocating trivia-hoarding; she's advocating internal coherence - the kind that lets you improvise confidently because you actually know what the person would do and what the place would allow. The line "more fully realized inside my own mind" gives away the real audience: the author herself. The goal isn't to impress readers with lore, but to make the fictional reality solid enough that the next sentence feels inevitable.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that you can "plot your way out" of any dead end. Zettel points to a different bottleneck: insufficient specificity. "Some aspect of the story or the characters" is tellingly vague, because the blockage can hide anywhere - a character's unexamined fear, a missing social rule, an economic constraint, the geography of a room. When those constraints are absent, scenes become weightless; nothing forces a choice, so nothing happens. Research and background notes aren't busywork in this view, they're pressure. They create limits, and limits create narrative.
Context matters: Zettel comes out of science fiction and fantasy traditions where worldbuilding isn't garnish, it's infrastructure. Her advice reads like a genre veteran's corrective to the "just write" mantra. She isn't advocating trivia-hoarding; she's advocating internal coherence - the kind that lets you improvise confidently because you actually know what the person would do and what the place would allow. The line "more fully realized inside my own mind" gives away the real audience: the author herself. The goal isn't to impress readers with lore, but to make the fictional reality solid enough that the next sentence feels inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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