And, I suppose this is a very convoluted way of saying you should just write what you need to write and, if it helps, think of these later scenes as separate from your general story, allowing you to both get them out of your head and continue with your need to write in order. You might (or might not) realize it, but almost every single story is a handful of moments strung together by minute details. Those moments are the parts of the text that are beautifully described, almost always a dissertation on an hour – or even minutes – of time. Because the author probably thought of that moment first and all the story leading up to that moment was just their interpretation of how that moment could logically come about.

I wouldn’t fret so much. I spent about a week staring down one of my novels in complete anger and disgust because it wasn’t fun to write anymore. I was trying to force myself to write according to the outline I had come up with and it was if my characters were saying “Don’t force this on us!,” as if even they didn’t believe they should have to be explained in novel-form. So I started another story and it’s flowing along and all these adjectives are flying out of my fingers and I realized that giving up (for the time being) on this first story wasn’t a form of failure, it was the exact solution I needed to not give myself a headache and go on a writer’s strike just because I didn’t want to write a certain scene in a certain way.

I think guide books are only good for telling you how to write a specific form of literature (like a screenplay or a sonnet). If your story is good enough, people will mold it into “the rules” anyway, no matter how it progresses or how you set about writing it.