“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.
9781963108712
English
288
Hardcover
April 14, 2026
5 ½ x 8 ½
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