The Never-Ending Story

It could just be that I'm writing a bunch of drivel because I don't know where the story is heading, but I find myself concocting a lot of needless scenes that seem to go on forever. Take yesterday, for example. Once again, I wrote for my usual four hours and ended up with one scene. One scene in four hours. And not even an interesting scene. It's not that I didn't try to stay on plot, but as a linear writer I needed to write the next logical scenario, rather than flash forward to a completely different setting. That would have been fine, but that next logical scenario went on for far too long. I described the interior of the building and the various rooms within it, and I brought in approximately five different characters. Plus, I relied too much on dialogue, which is my usual fallback. The only important thing I managed to relay was that my MC is human after all, and not some lah dee dah, everything is great Pollyanna. She at last reached her breaking point. 

Did any of that advance the story? Not particularly. All it did was set up the next scene, which leads me to the conclusion that this will be a never-ending story. I've yet to read it back, but I'm fairly confident I won't keep much of it. Maybe my problem was that I felt like I had to write, rather than wanting to write. I've had no recent flashes of inspiration and I have absolutely no idea where this story is leading, if anywhere. Honestly. I'd previously written the complete novella before realizing it was too sparse. That's when I decided to introduce a new character, which sparked my interest for a while. But that changed the entire focus of the book. Aside from introducing her and hinting at her bad acts, I can think of no satisfying resolution, and even if I did, I have miles to go before I will even reach it.

Thus, I just keep writing scenes.  

Maybe I should just view this as "something to do", a time occupier. Good practice. I should simply revel in the enjoyment of writing, with no ultimate goal to reach. 

Because if I care to admit it, this story is going nowhere.