While this is not a piece of writing advice I frequently employ, it has nevertheless come to my aid on more than one occasion: do the opposite. If you find yourself stuck at a certain part in your story, and nothing else seems to be working, do the opposite of whatever it is you’ve been trying to do up until this point.
I’ll give you an example: a while back, I was attempting to write a pivotal emotional scene for my character during which I was hoping to convey a more ethereal/poetic tone. And, as I have said once before and will probably say again, I am not very poetically minded. When I tried to write the scene with poetic language, it just ended up sounding flat and uninteresting. Eventually I gave up on poetry and decided to state how my character was feeling/what she was seeing in as straightforward a manner as possible. And ironically, by trying to be straightforward I ended up latching on to details and concepts that made my descriptions sound more poetic in the long run. Now, it’s one of my favorite scenes.
Another example: in an original scene of my novel, I wanted to present my villain as redeemable—but after a back-and-forth with a trusted beta reader, I realized that by consciously trying to make my villain redeemable, I made him a bit too human… which made him seem even more flawed and therefore still kind of villainous, just in different ways. As I worked on the next draft, I found myself putting more focus on his wickedness, and even enjoying it to a certain extent. When looking at the rewritten scene a while later I realized that, even in the midst of focusing on this character’s evil side, I had managed to slip in glimpses of his compassion on a more subconscious level. And now that his good side seems rare and fleeting, instead of lying in wait beneath the surface, I feel like I have made him a little more real and a little more relatable—and therefore, more redeemable (and now that scene is one of my other favorites).
I think the trick, in this case, is that by putting more focus on something you don’t intend, it allows your subconscious mind to fill in the blanks with what you do intend. Give it a try, and see if it helps!