What do you guys do when you hit the skids?

How do you rejuvenate your mind when you're feeling tapped out?

I interview my characters by asking one or more of the following:

What's wrong with this plot (or scene or idea)?

How do you feel about another character?

Tell me about the best/worst moment of your childhood?

If nobody would ever know, what would you do to another character?

And if asking a single question of a single character doesn't shake things loose, I imagine them in a group and ask the same questions and let them argue among themselves.

I also talk to my characters.
This morning I realized I had totally ignored the feelings of my MC during a small scene that I wrote very early on. I missed a very critical reaction. Couldn't believe it. So then I wrote a secondary scene today. (I would have just edited the first scene but this year I'm adhering to the NaNo adage Don't Edit!)

If I'm really stuck then I walk away from the computer. I wash dishes or treadmill or play solitaire. Anything 'mindless'. I generally find that my characters will begin to speak to me when I do that and then I'm ready to go back to the computer.

Oh, one more thing I do... research. It never fails that when I'm researching, something will spark my imagination. Maybe I'm just a detail geek, but it works for me.

Thanks! I'm trying out the questions and I've been able to write a bit.

A guy in my writing group claims that whenever Mark Twain got stuck during the writing of Puddin'head Wilson' he wrote a scene in which a character fell down a well, then went back after he was done and cut all the well scenes.

I don't know if that's true at all, but the last time I did Nanowrimo, whenever I got stuck I'd write a new scene in which my characters had sex.

There are a few things you can do, that sometimes help:

- Get away from the keyboard. Did you have a chore that needed doing? Trying that. (I clean the bathroom. Scrubbing the tub gets amazing things going during that monotonous work.)

- Get some sugar/caffeine/tea to pep you up a little. Sometimes it drains because you lack an item in your system.

-Two NaNo addages I've heard a lot this year:
- when it trouble, kill a character
- When stuck, write a scene with two characters sleeping together.
From these, write out the consequences.

Well I've been hitting some snags this week and I'm writing kind of a YA story so I can't really go with the characters sleeping together...

The advice I'd give though is try a timed write. We did a word war at one of my local write ins and it was a challenge to write as much as you can in 15 minutes. I'm a slow typer so I only hit 573 words, but forcing myself to get the words out led my characters to come up with a plan of sneaking onto a pirate ship. It was totally unexpected but really drove the story forward (and I have no idea where the idea came from).

Another suggestion is to go back to any original notes you had before you started. Sort of like Victoria's idea for doing research, I looked back to my initial character sketches this morning and found an outline for a scene that I had totally forgotten about! I'm looking forward to including it next!

I changed from third to first person. The novel is still drek, but the words seem to be coming easier.