Editing Tip of the Day: Choose Your Own (Sentence) Adventure

Today's post is inspired by the time I spent this week helping one of my kids, who has some learning disabilities, with a writing assignment. She had to write a short story for English, after plotting it out with a nice chart the teacher had given out. And even though kiddo is extremely smart and creative and great at telling stories, putting them on paper is an incredibly stressful experience for her.
Enter writer and editor mom, to the rescue! And as we tackled her assignment together and I did my best to nudge her along, I realized something that hadn't quite clicked before.

Every sentence is a choose-your-own-adventure type pivot point.

Each sentence builds on the one that came before it. Presenting her with choices at each sentence when she didn't know what to say next helped her to avoid getting stuck in the dreaded writer's block.
In practical terms, our discussion went something like this:
Me: Okay, you have a mob of angry villagers approaching the main character and her giant, hungry cat. Does she hear or see them first?
Her: Hear them.
Me: Okay, what do they sound like?
Her: Describes it.
Me: Okay, so does she see them next or run away?
Her: She sees them.
Me: What do they look like?
Her: Angry mob with pitchforks! Standard stuff.
Me: Got it. So how does the main character react? Does she say anything, do anything, feel anything? What is the giant cat who's the cause of all the fuss doing?

Hopefully you get the idea. By using this technique of approaching every sentence as a potential fork in the road, we were able to keep her from getting stuck in any one spot, and actually wrote a first draft that was twice as long as it needed to be. (Oops. But that's what editing is for!)
So next time you feel a bout of writer's block coming on, or you just aren't sure where the scene you're working on is going, try the choose-your-own-adventure approach at the sentence level. You might be surprised at how well it works!