Bogged Down with Legends of Wind
It's not that I have a lot of writer's block, it's the mash-up of stories I'm compiling that all have to fit together in some way. I have outlines and I have a heap of unfinished stories, all going into one book(quite a mess that has amassed into 245 pages). It's been fun, of course, but I'm looking for some kind of inspiration to make the work go faster and for everything to come together in all ways and directions written of, coming full circle. I'm also obsessed with the idea that a character in a book can claim to write it.
My question is how to organize these ideas into a finished book.
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Lauren has some very good advice there, but the one thing I would add would be a timeline. If the stories you already have are tied together in any way, then try to lay them out on a timeline to show the order in which they occur. Even if they are not tied together, as long as they have a common setting, you could still use a timeline to establish an order for telling the overall story.
Another thing to consider is looking for a common thread. If you have one character that is common to each story, then try to organize each story based on that character's experiences and the order in which the events occurred. If each story has a common theme, then group them together based on how the different characters perceive that theme.
The main point is to find some way in which you can provide some consistency to your stories. From what you have posted, I get the sense that you may have a collection of short stories or perhaps each separate story is a chapter or scene from a single overarching story. Figure out how to tie them together and then start putting them into place.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3962. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You are trying to do too much at once. You're flailing around in a cloud. The easiest way for me to get out of the cloud is to start asking and answering hard, definable questions, and completing hard, definable tasks.
- Create and define a character.
- Decide what you want the character to do. Give the character a reason or reasons for doing it.
- Start the character at some distance from the goal. "Distance" can be physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, any combination of the above.
- Give the character some friends. (Or don't.)
- Give the character some enemies. (This can include the character him/herself.)
- Establish some obstacles the character has to surmount to reach the goal.
- "Things go wrong." Lather, rinse, repeat.
- Sketch out an outline of how the character gets around the obstacles. Include how the friends help and the enemies hinder.
Everything else is details.
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