I hit a writing block and couldn't finish tonight's chapter.
For the past few days, I'd been stuck in a mental tug-of-war over whether the story should focus more on dungeon plotlines or on conflict. From yesterday until now, I hadn't come up with a good approach.
Maybe the more I thought about it, the messier it became. All that mental strain had left me feeling a little agitated.
I'd originally planned to slow the plot down and build things up gradually, but when I reread the parts after entering the dungeon today, I realized that wouldn't work. It was too flat.
A normal rhythm should have crises rising and falling, killing everywhere, with a chapter—or half a chapter—of calmer plot interspersed in between, so readers could alternate between tension and release.
And writing this far made me realize why I'd hit a block.
Everyone was familiar with the trope of a group of contestants entering a dungeon—or secret realm. It was a common webnovel setup. But I thought back to the novels I knew, the ones I'd read, and how they handled it.
Usually, a bunch of geniuses got thrown into a dungeon, then everyone wandered around, dug up treasures, and slaughtered everything in sight.
The plot tension was nothing more than one group showing up to bully the protagonist, only for the protagonist to kill them in return. Then another group showed up, and the protagonist killed them too, all the way until taking first place.
Yes, that was it. Very simple.
But if you added the premise of clearing the dungeon, the difficulty multiplied several times over. You had to perfectly combine slaughtering everything in sight with progressing through the dungeon at the same time.
It sounded easy, but once you actually wrote it—damn, it was hard!