I get stuck on WIPs moderately often. So do lots of people, I think. What follows is a list of common problems I’ve run into, and some ways in which they can be resolved to get things rolling again.
No guarantee that this will be of any particular use with any particular WIP.
The other day, in search of something to do while I was feeling under the weather, I downloaded Chocolatier on a recommendation from Jay Is Games. Despite not thinking it was that brilliant a game, I wound up buying the full version; and thinking about why I did that has led me to some other thoughts about the appealing aspects of IF.
Jeff Nyman recently raised the idea of having a guide to Inform 7 specifically written for an experienced fiction author without background in IF, and I posted a brainstormed outline for such a project. The formatting was pretty ugly on Usenet, though, and I had a few ideas for revisions, so here is another, longer and better-laid-out version of the same thing, with more links to relevant games and articles.
This still isn’t nearly into the shape I would use if I were actually going to write this book — and I don’t have time to do any such thing right now anyway; I have a bunch of things to do for Inform 7, feelies.org, and the long-neglected theory book before I could take up a project of this magnitude. (And I’d like to have a little time to work on a WIP of my own — IF support work has pretty much wiped out my time for that kind of thing lately.) But possibly people will find the brainstorming interesting, even if it isn’t worked up into a complete document.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 