Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page

Ramona Ausubel

“Ramona Ausubel has poured so much humor and wisdom and practically useful counsel into this extraordinary book, a guide for both writing and living. This is the gift I want to give to every future student and to anyone who has traveled out of range of their strangest and wildest dreams.”

- Karen Russell, Tin House

With the humor of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, the practicality of Natalie Goldberg’s classic Writing Down the Bones, and the warmth of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page is your creative process’s new best friend.

ISBN

9781963108712

Language

English

Page count

288

Edition

Hardcover

Sale date

April 14, 2026

Dimensions

5 ½ x 8 ½

About the Book

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.


“With wit, warmth, and wisdom, Ramona Ausubel offers guidance to her fellow writers. Unstuck is a deeply companionable book and the advice it offers is both practical and helpful—go for a walk, write for an extra twenty minutes, take pleasure in falling down rabbit holes. I cannot imagine a writer, at whatever stage, who will not find these suggestions inspiring.”
—Margot Livesey

“Ausubel is the philosopher fairy godmother you’ve been waiting for—ready to nudge you toward the next solution, to show you how to trade fear for curiosity, worry for wonder. What a wise and warm guide to navigating the long haul of creative practice.”
—Melissa Febos