The Art of Getting Unstuck

Ramona Ausubel with practical, real-life ideas about moving forward with creative projects

May 18, 2026

We all need a helping hand. “I haven’t met a writer yet who feels like, oh yeah, I know exactly how to do this. And I am fully equipped, ready.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of Unstuck

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 165 with Ramona Ausubel

Whether you’re writing your first short story or your seventeenth novel, chances are at some point in your project, you’ll get stuck. What then? Our guest, Ramona Ausubel’s newest book, Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide, which contains 101 exercises to invigorate your creative practice and help you finish your writing project. “These are the things I really use,” Ramona says. “They are not hypothetical exercises.” Nor are they one-size-fits all … as Ramona notes, at different points in a project you need different strategies. This is basically the Big Hope episode in which you remember that everyone gets stuck and there are practical, usable ways of meeting a page to help you go on.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

I love Laura Grace Weldon’s poems—they tend toward the humble, the humorous, the human. These two, from earlier this week in ONE ART, both made me smile and feel so seen.
“So many of us have been taught to rush past pain to get back to productivity, praise or pleasantness,” writes K. J. Ramsey in her new memoir The Place Between Our Pains. “In doing so, we sidestep the place where joy actually dwells.” It’s a brave, funny, brutal story of life-threatening illness, travel, being stuck in a hospital bed, and finding the hope that can only arise out of misery. I love the honesty of it—how so many of us are given lives we could not have said yes to—and here we see how we might not only survive but be found by joy in the midst of great pain—not in a glib way, but in a bone-deep, life-affirming way.

Christie:

I fell in love with Claire Boyles’s forthcoming novel, Appraisals. The story follows four generations of a farming family in Northern Colorado who are perpetually pinched by economic and ecological forces beyond their control. There’s Maggie, who is struggling to keep her small organic farm afloat amidst a recession and an unpredictable climate; her grandmother, Flora, who taught her to love their connection to the land; Fish, her husband who makes difficult choices in his quest to keep the family financially solvent; and their teenage daughter Ozzie, who is becoming politically active on issues that threaten to divide the family. Boyles creates a layered, complex story about how outsiders with money can change a place, the conflicts wrought by difficult economic times, and the struggle to maintain one’s values while also keeping the farm. The characters are as real and nuanced as the story. I’m thrilled that Boyles will be speaking at our Second Annual Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium this September.
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a delightful novella that has a sense of fun to it, even as it explore some deep themes (robot sentience, memory, political conflict, the horrors of online reviews, and more). The story follows a group of lovable robots who, after been granted certain rights (they are no longer mere property, but can’t vote), open up a noodle shop in San Francisco. It takes place in the not that distant future, when California has split off from the US and climate calamities continue to disrupt infrastructure and society. As they have done in previous works, Newitz explores ethical issues around sentient robots and what happens when things that we are used to thinking of as inanimate objects start to have intelligence and feelings. The story also offers a glimpse into the ways that supportive communities develop in times of hardship.

When Feeling Stuck

Sometimes I forget I’m surrounded
by whirl, forget the earth’s turning,
forget our galaxy’s spiraling nature.
But it helps me today to remember myself
as swirl, from the whorl in my fingerprints
to the curl in my hair to the twirl in my step
as I move through the rooms of a house
that somehow feels solid and stable. It helps
to think of the day as a twist,
an infinite trip on a mobius strip,
and suddenly stuck isn’t quite so stuck,
and whatever in me is wedged
isn’t quite so wedged, and I become more
like a starry night, ethereal, dreamlike,
as I start to recall the joy in the spinning,
the freedom in the churning,
and I open again to a magic that invites me to play
far beyond the frame.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week, we talk about trusting our ideas are “good enough” to deserve being put into a book, the importance of accountability in creative projects and how to find it, why a willingness to wade into the mess can be a creative superpower, and why parents might want to leave particular books lying around the house.

Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

What is a mantra that you have for your creative process?
Do you have any superstitions about your creative practice (a special place, a special cup, a special pen …)?