How do you get out of a corner when plotting yourself into a corner?

Question

When you write a plot that becomes so convoluted that it becomes impossible to resolve without resorting to contrived or unrealistic solutions, how do you write yourself out of a corner?

For example, let's say I wrote a mystery story with too many red herrings. How do you provide a satisfying resolution without feeling like you cheated? Is there a way to disentangle yourself from such a mess?

Answer 1

The common advice is to write detective puzzles backwards. That is, you begin with who did it, decide how this is discovered, and then work backwards via the clues that will lead to this discovery all the way to the riddle as it presents itself to the sleuth and the reader at the beginning. That way you avoid writing yourself to a point where a case cannot be solved using the means that you provided to the protagonist.

As for other corners that one write oneself into, I have found the following procedure helpful:

1. Put the manuscript away and work on another project.
2. After a long enough time during which you have forgotten most of the details of your stuck project, sit down and – without looking at what you wrote before! – outline or discovery write it again.

Ideally, in your mind the story will have coagulated into a coherent form through time and distance. If not,

3. Abandon the story or commission an editor to clean up the plot for you.

Answer 2

Revision.

Go back and decide which red herrings have to go.

Sometimes this, in fact, requires inventing new red herrings because you concluded an entire subplot has to go, it produces too many bad red herrings, and leaves you without enough.

Some writers sometimes find it useful to analyze the structure of the story to figure out what the main branch is, but not all.

Answer 3

Have a fight scene.

I remember some writing advice I read a while ago. It might have been for movies or roleplaying games, but it would probably fit here:

When things start getting overly confusing or boring, throw in a fight scene.

It's exciting, it's flashy, and if you're writing a detective story, it can help simplify the mystery by leaving some of the red herrings dead. This can be through literal violence leaving the suspects dead, or by the goons attacking the detective protagonists narrowing the field of suspects ("The men who attacked us were members of the Calzone gang! That must mean that the person who killed the Cardinal must be one of the gang's leaders!").