How do I work through writer's block?

There are two kinds of writers: plotters and discovery writers.

Discovery writers sit down and just type, literally "discovering" what happens as they go, and then must go back and impose a structure on the text at the end.

Plotters outline and come up with the entire structure beforehand, and write along the skeleton of that outline.

If you are stuck for ideas, it may mean that discovery writing doesn't work for you. You may need to find a more traditional structure for your story and assemble an outline first. I have found The Snowflake Method to be useful, and The Hero's Journey, but there are other structures and other tools.

You're stuck because you can't get from A to B. Go back to the beginning, pick a skeleton, and put A and B on it. That should help you fill in the gaps.

posted almost 9 years ago

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Lauren Ipsum‭

2098 reputation 13 1143 397 1

Take your criticism down A LOT of notches.

Instead of struggling on that One Great Idea you can't get, and dismissing everything you come by as crap, pick a painfully generic plot, add one simple, standard trick, and just start writing.

Pick any of fairy tales, even the most generic one, knight saves a princess from a dragon. Add one simple, trivial modification: "In Space". Or "On the Internet". Or "From the Dragon's perspective". Or "The Princess doesn't like it." Or "The Dragon is the Princess." Whatever to move away from the -totally bland- into -trite-.

Then start writing. And if ideas come, apply them. Change stuff. Let the plot wander wherever it wills. If they don't, just keep writing that generic stuff. Usually, they will come, sooner or later.

My recent story went like this. Pick: Spielberg's 'E.T.'. Twist: The alien has a quad-digit IQ (or more), and mastery of mathematics. The beginning is quite generic. Then the alien decides to obtain funds to build the phone to call home. How to build massive funds quickly? Through playing on the stock market. What are some risks associated with it? Getting caught up in the thrill of the gamble.

"That escalated quickly" would be an understatement.

posted almost 9 years ago

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SF.‭

540 reputation 8 40 103 0

Lauren Ipsum has some great ideas to start with, and sometimes it just takes thinking more conceptually about the story to kick through.

For instance, do you know conceptually what you want to happen next? That is, let's say your protagonist is in a bank but the next thing you have an idea for is him getting on a plane. Conceptually, you know you need a series of bridging scenes getting the protagonist from the bank to the airport, and along the way there's a zombie outbreak which makes the trip more difficult, or there's a fire raging in the only tunnel from the bank's part of town to the airport feeder bypass, or a there's a bomb on the plane and he has to get there before it goes off somehow...

...you get the idea.

But if you don't know conceptually what you want to happen next, but you do have ideas for later in the book, then you can simply write the ideas that come later.

Try not to get trapped in the time line of your story. That is, don't worry about getting the story onto the page in the order the reader will experience it; you're the omnipotent writer of the story, and you are not bound by its time line. So, write what comes next - whether that's what the reader will experience next when they read the story is irrelevant.

What happens is, writing the next thing can kick things loose in your brain. When you have the next idea down, it might become clear what has to happen to get the story from where you got stuck to the next thing you wrote. But even if it doesn't, you just keep going. You can go back at any time to fill the gaps, to add foreshadowing, to add plants and clues and subtext.

Think movies - TONS of movies are filmed out of sequence with how we see them in their final form. Writing can be the same. Just write what comes to you next. That's the next thing.

Don't let yourself get bogged down by the linear progress of the story. You're not bound by that as the writer; write what you see next, what the next thing is, irrespective of the place in the story's time line. It doesn't have to be what the reader sees next, only what you do.

I know, that was a long-winded raving explanation and I'm sorry, but hopefully that will give you some boost.

Now, to piggyback on Lauren Ispum's idea, I recommend Algis Budrys's 7-point plot system. You need, in the beginning section of the story:

1. A Character
2. In a context (setting)
3. With a problem

If you have those three things, then the next step in the story is for the character (and any allies) make a logical but erroneous attempt to solve the problem, which nets failure. That failure is both unexpected and educational - they learn more about the problem. This leads to another attempt to solve the problem which nets failure, costs more, but also exposes more of the true problem. One more attempt/fail, and that leads to the final push, the give-it-all effort of the protagonist(s) which will either net victory, finally, or final failure up to and including death.

So with that in mind, you can place the ideas you have on the spine Lauren Ipsum spoke of, and discover what's missing. It's the same method LI described, but with a different plotting device.

Hope that helps some!

posted almost 9 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Josh‭

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