Mapping the Coordinates

What to do when your story hits the brakes

If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is an essay in my ongoing “Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time” series where I deep-dive into my writing fiction to heal method as field work and a case study. To begin, I will be working through my story, The Archive, which you can find more information on here.

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I knew something was wrong the moment I sat down to write Entries #5 and #6 of The Archive.

Words were coming but they didn’t feel right. Momentum stalled. The gnawing in my stomach that something was wrong with the story rooted in. At first, I thought it was just a technical problem—maybe Ari needed more agency, maybe I needed to rethink her choices. Then I thought it was a creative problem—maybe my intuition radar was off. I even thought maybe it was the external pressure of knowing people are going to read the entires that was throwing me off.

But the more I examined it, the more I realized:

This wasn’t about plot.

This wasn’t about intuition.

This was about avoidance.

I’ve been hesitant to put Ari into situations that truly test her, to force her into moments of real danger. She’s struggled, yes—but I’ve never let her hit the kind of suffering that demands transformation.

And it’s not just because I’m trying to keep the story moving.

It’s because Ari is an extension of me.

If she has to face something too painful, too uncertain, too real—then I have to face it, too.

And maybe that’s why I’ve kept her just safe enough.

Autopilot Vigilance: When the Story Hits the Brakes

In Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive?, Becca Syme talks about a concept called autopilot vigilance.

“In the case of human intuition, I see the ‘switching to manual control’ as becoming consciously aware of what I’m doing in the moment. It might feel like being stuck or stopped, but it might also feel like there’s a different path you need to go down.”¹

That was exactly what was happening with The Archive.

I’d hit an invisible wall. No forward progress, no matter how much I tried. But instead of pushing through blindly, I needed to pause and ask:

• Where is this resistance coming from?

• What am I trying to force?

• What if this stuckness is actually telling me something important?

Syme suggests that when this type of intuitive block happens, there’s always a fix—but you have to be willing to dig for it. And that’s what I decided to do.

Tracking the Avoidance: Mapping the Coordinates

One of the things Syme suggests is that stuckness almost always comes from a missing coordinate—some essential aspect of the story that hasn’t been fully worked out yet.

Character-driven writers often get stuck when they haven’t fully considered these coordinates:

• The character’s emotional state in a scene

• The emotional arc throughout the book

• Conflicting motivations

• Backstory gaps

• The character’s trajectory or what they need to learn

That made me wonder—what are the coordinates I return to when I’m writing fiction to heal?

Because my process isn’t just about character arcs. It’s about the deeper emotional and symbolic layers. It’s about making sure that the story is doing what it’s meant to do—not just narratively, but emotionally and thematically.

So I created the Writing Fiction to Heal Companion (an Ai bot) — a way to check my work against the deeper coordinates I care about most.

The 5 Writing Fiction to Heal Coordinates

These are the five coordinates I now check my writing against:

• Emotional Resonance: Does this scene hit the right emotional depth? Does it feel true?

• Symbolic Layering: Are the symbols reinforcing the emotional and thematic arcs?

• Character Healing Arc: Is the character moving toward or away from healing?

• Shadow Work Reflection: What unconscious wounds are surfacing? What is the character avoiding?

• Author’s Voice & Connection: What is my relationship to this scene? What am I working through?

Instead of trying to force a solution, I ran Entry #5 through the Writing Fiction to Heal Companion to see what came up.

Running Entry #5 Through the Companion

The results were game-changing. This is the beautiful, ethical and worthwhile aspects of working with Ai technology, in my opinion.

💖 Emotional Resonance Check:

• Emotion Driving the Scene: Grief and determination—Ari is losing, losing, losing and still choosing to keep going.

• One-Word Emotional Core: Survival. But not the cold, practical kind—the messy, aching, “survival because I promised I would” kind.

✅ What’s Working: The Tower Card symbolism, the grief-threaded humor, and the origami photos as a metaphor for folding memories into something bearable.

🔄 Revision Tip: Make her emotional reactions more visceral—grief not just in words, but in the body.

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🌀 Symbolic Layering Check:

• The Tower Card: The fall of her sanctuary—but also the forced transformation. She has to move forward now.

• The Origami Photos: The way she literally folds her memories into something smaller, portable, bearable—this is so Ari.

• The Tarnished Locket: A symbol of found stories and lost stories. She doesn’t know its history, but she chooses to carry it anyway.

✅ What’s Working: The symbolic choices you’ve made are are layered and meaningful without being forced.

🔄 Revision Tip: Echo the most important emotional symbol from these entries at the end of Entry #6.

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💔 Character Healing Arc Check:

• Emotional State Start to End: Shock → Grief → Resignation → Survival.

• Is This Scene Moving Her Toward or Away from Healing? Both. The library destroys her illusion of safety, but the van gives her possibility.

✅ What’s Working: Ari is forced to reconsider what “safety,” “comfort” and “shelter” actually means when the library is destroyed.

🔄 Revision Tip: Make the emotional beats more significant for Ari.

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🌑 Shadow Work Reflection:

• Humor as Armor: Her jokes are getting darker, and she’s using them like a shield—because feeling everything fully would break her.

• Self-Abandonment: She’s crumbling inside but she doesn’t stop. She moves. She survives first, processes later.

• Isolation: Even in the van, with her animals, it’s just her against the world. She’s the Hermit, fully now.

✅ What’s Working: Ari’s shadows are definitely coming into focus more clearly now.

🔄 Revision Tip: Consider choosing one shadow aspect for Ari to work through consciously.

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✍️ Author’s Meta-Reflection:

This chapter feels like you (and Ari) are wrestling with impossible survival questions—how much can you lose and still be you? When is survival enough?

✅ What’s Working: The underlying struggles that you seem to be facing are starting to show through within Ari’s struggles.

🔄 Revision Tip: Consider these questions and including them into your next entries:

• What emotion is driving this next scene?

• What symbols need to deepen or echo?

• What is Ari avoiding?

• What am I trying to work through in this moment?

What I’m Learning

First off, I’m really glad that I’ve built this essay series space because what I’ve learned from this process so far is that “writing about writing” and “writing about the intuitive writing life” is important. Documenting the struggles I’m facing while writing The Archive is just as important as documenting the exciting and forward-moving progress because this is real life and how stories get built and written — mistakes, missteps and all.

Second, I’m learning how to discern and add tools to my toolbox (like the information from Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive? and building the WF2H Companion Bot) that help me “unstick” my “stuck” and move forward.

Tangentially, as I’ve been writing, thinking, researching and observing what is going on in society (specifically, the U.S.), the more convinced I am than ever that fiction writers are playing a crucial part in the resistance to oppression. I am learning that my choice to write the “truth” into my fiction is subversive, risky and brave. Because while Ari (and me) may not move mountains or topple governments or save lives… we are leaving behind a record of what it means to be alive in this moment. And our future will depend on these types of narratives to learn and grow from.

Next time…

I’ll be talking about post-apocalyptic genre “rules” and where I’m following, bending and breaking them as I write The Archive.

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To read the backstory to why I’m writing this series:

Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time

To read the backstory on why I’m serializing “The Archive,”:

The Backstory 📖

1. Syme, Becca; Bischoff, Susan. Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive? (QuitBooks for Writers Book 6) (p. 105). (Function). Kindle Edition.