Writing into (and out of) the corner

So you've written this awesome scene, or placed your pawns (aka characters) just perfectly to create a perfect scenario… and then you are stuck.

There is no way you can solve the problem in a way that pans out well for the character or the plot, or what you had in mind would be happening by the time your reached this point in your story.

In short, you've written yourself into a corner.

What now?

There are two ways to go about such a thing:

1. Back to formula: go back and rewrite the situation so that the conditions leading to it are different, and thus you get a different (i.e. usually the desired) result.

2. Resolve the story as it naturally wants to be resolved. It might not be what you wanted or what you had in mind, but it is definitely the way out of the corner and very definitely what the characters bring about.

Both ways are legitimate. Neither is a cop out- in both you sacrifice something. In the first option you sacrifice all the work you did beyond the point from which you decide to rewrite. In the second option, you sacrifice the resolution you'd envisaged.

Sometimes though, no matter how many times you try to follow option one, everything pushes you to the dreaded option two: I recall when i wrote my first publishable story, I had the rosiest, most sugary ending in mind for the characters (it was a high fantasy story about a rogue and a witch). But they ended up dying. ALL of them. I rewrote the story maybe four different ways trying to get them to survive and have the ending I'd wanted for them. And still, if I remained faithful to their personalities they ended up dying no matter how I tried to stage the sequence of events (and of course given the big bad's methods).

In the end, I did cry as I wrote the final draft, but the characters did end up dead as they wanted. The damn brats.

Sometimes similar things occur in my webcomics, especially Without Moonlight; by now I've learned to just roll with it and go ahead. No matter how much my original plans are thwarted.

But in the same time, I haven't experienced writing myself into a corner for more than a decade.