Ever know what you want to write, only you can’t find a way forward? Maybe you’ve got the idea, you can see the scenes, perhaps even pick up on some of the sensory details, but you can’t quite find the path you need to make your piece flow?

I’ve been working on a series of researched vignettes for a collection of essays and yet I’m still not there. It’s like I’m pushing one of those old fashioned ploughs through the driest of soils. I just can’t get any traction and if there’s one thing a writer needs it is the sense that she is making progress. Tiny movements—but progress regardless.

So I thought I would share with you a few tips for how I’m navigating this time in hopes you might find it beneficial as well.

• Write to your best friend. Not really, but imagine you are telling this story to your best friend. It might just help you find the tone you need to write the piece you imagine.

• Read (or reread) the work of authors whose language or characters excite you and are particularly evocative. Sharon Olds, JoAnn Beard, Michelle Hoover, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter, Dan Chaon— I could keep going. These are the authors who enthrall me and whose books time and again do not disappoint. Make your own list. Still not sure who might be on that list? Check out the covers of books you’ve enjoyed to see who is blurbing said books and you just might find your next favorite author

• You've written other pieces that have worked—pieces that you love and others were moved by as well. Can you isolate what it is that you are doing in that piece?

• Change up the form. Could this story be a poem? A hermit-crab essay? Sometimes even white space will change my approach toward a piece.

• So much about finding your voice is feeling comfortable in your skin and writing the way that only you can. This is most trying when you feel you’ve lost your way. But like many of us have been forced to do at one time or another, you need to fake it. Keep sitting down at your desk, keep working to become the best that you can at your craft and you’ll get there. Both of us will