Every writer occasionally experiences the feeling of mushiness, where it feels like things in the story are going nowhere. This happens to everyone. An easy way to take stock of the situation is to use The Dashboard.
The dashboard is a chart that helps you visualize some elements of your writing. I use five categories, and mark the use of that category on a scale of 1 to 5, one being the lowest(or most specific; more on that in a second).
SCOPE [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
EXPOSITION [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
VOLATILITY [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
VISCERALITY[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
SURREALITY [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Let's define some of these terms. SCOPE represents how much visual space you are referring to. So describing the twitch of one man's eyebrow would be SCOPE 1 and describing a whole city's worth of action would be a SCOPE 5. EXPOSITION can refer to how much dialogue you are writing, or more generally how often you as the author are directly telling the reader about the world. Dialogue falls under this category because it is often used as a vehicle for exposition. 'Exposition' is considered a bad word in some circles, by people who gripe about showing rather than telling. But being able to efficiently and smoothly deliver world information to your reader(aka to Exposit) is a great skill to have! VOLATILITY represents the stakes of the situation. To put it another way, VOLATILITY is a way of measuring tension. Lazily sipping tea in the mid morning sun is VOLATILITY 1, watching the moon crash through the earth's crust is VOLATILITY 5. VISCERALITY measures how much you are making the reader feel. Using lots of adjectives and describing sensations to make things more gross or sensual or action packed is all VISCERALITY. SURREALITY pulls double duty on the dashboard. It can describe a general level of 'weirdness' in the text, but more importantly, it measures how interconnected your lines are. Generally, each sentence you write will refer to a sentence preceding it. Reading primers are a great example of this. "Oh, Jane. See Spot and Tim. See Spot Run," has clauses that are very interconnected. That's a SURREALITY 1. Something like "Oh Jane. The President awoke with tears in his eyes. It had been 3000 years since spaceships waged war above Alpha Centauri," has no connection between the sentences. That is more of a SURREALITY 5.
The idea here is to monitor your own levels here. So let's say I'm writing something, and it just feels directionless and bad to me. I don't know what's wrong yet. I write up a dashboard based on what my last couple paragraphs look like, which might be:
SCOPE [ ] [ ] [ ] [X] [ ]
EXPOSITION [ ] [ ] [X] [ ] [ ]
VOLATILITY [ ] [X] [ ] [ ] [ ]
VISCERALITY[ ] [ ] [ ] [X] [ ]
SURREALITY [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
After taking a step back with the Dashboard, I realize that I have had a pretty high SCOPE and EXPOSITION for a couple paragraphs, and I might decide to turn that down in favor of some VOLATILITY. With more VOLATILITY, I might need less VISCERALITY to keep the reader engaged, so that can go down a couple notches too. There is no hard and fast rule about when you should make changes like this. The Dashboard is just there for you to get another perspective on what you're already doing. I 3D printed a dashboard for myself for fun, but this whole process is easily done scribbled on a sheet of paper. The five qualities I've listed can also be hot swapped for other qualities you find more important to your writing.