Unstuck: A Writer's Guide - Hardcover

by Ramona Ausubel (Author)

A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 from LitHub

"Ramona Ausubel has poured so much humor and wisdom and practically useful counsel into this extraordinary book, a guide for both writing and living." --Karen Russell, author of The Antidote

Unstuck 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page is about staying in love with your writing: feeling excited, mischievous, productive, and hopeful--the opposite of being stuck.

Critically acclaimed, award-winning author and beloved teacher Ramona Ausubel offers 101 exercises that promise to welcome you back to the page again and again; to reinvigorate your process and help you see your writing through to the end. Full of personal stories and hard-earned wisdom of a veteran writer, Unstuck is written in the first person, human to human, writer to writer. Practical, clear, and welcoming, Unstuck offers immediately useable strategies for beginning, continuing, and finishing a piece of writing.

Organized into doorways and keys, Unstuck turns problems into possibilities, offers keys to put into use right now, all designed to lead the writer back to the art, not toward an outside idea or formula. With Ausubel's steady, encouraging advice--find your doorway, unlock the lock, and get writing again.

Author Biography

Ramona Ausubel is the author of five books, most recently The Last Animal which was a national bestseller, received the National Book Foundation Science + Nature Prize and was a Barnes & Noble book of the month. Her previous books are 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 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 has taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars, Tin House Writing Workshop, Writing by Writers, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Environmental, Writing Workshop Paris and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.