McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

A Writer who can't Write

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Murphy's Stunt Double:
yep.


HAve you read Jim's blog on writing? He has an excellent article in there about how to get through the Great Swampy Middle. Might help you.

Roaram:
 so I have a real problem when I sit down to write. I come up with plots for other books, I draw doodles, I decide I should spend more time with my girlfriend, anything but write. and when I do wrtie, I get wrapped up thinking about how much I suck. or spend thirty minuets at a pop making myself the worlds louseiest thesaurus.

then along came my anal friend to prefrom the miricle of editing. not just a red pencil on paper, he red pencils my scatter thoughts and weeds out extra crap that at any given momemt I decide is crucial to my story.

he gave me this form we call  scene_by_scene. it looks like this

chapter:
characters: who is in the scene
where:
reason: why is the scene in the book
what happens: a summery   of the chapter and any full ideas about what happens

we wrote the whole book out in scene by scene form, and now we are writing the individual scenes to make chapters. because I have the scene already layed out I can set myself smaller chuncks of time to " write" plus my ideas stay there in the chapter where they belong. plus you can completely muck up a scene, get the bare bones laid out in detail and come back later without being afraid that changing a scene 5 will alter the entire book. maybe that helps?

Noey:
I actually kinda love that idea, because it's easier to set small goals that way. You've got the skeleton in your short summary, so all you need to do is dress it up. I'm definitely going to be trying that myself.

THETA:
I carry around either A, a flimsy pocket notebook for my purse or bag for school or work environments or B, a larger, more durable leather notebook for writing on personal time.  Record anything, dialogue, ideas, thoughts and remember to write an explanation to go along with it.  Don't take your ideas for granted, thinking you'll never forget the moment of brilliancy.  I've done that a lot, where i've abandoned story ideas because i hated them at the time, but as time progresses and you grow less frustrated with one of your works you try going back to it remembering you had all these clever ideas, but forgetting crucial parts of it.  Explanations are full developments of your thoughts are important. 

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Noey on March 12, 2008, 07:42:57 PM ---I actually kinda love that idea, because it's easier to set small goals that way. You've got the skeleton in your short summary, so all you need to do is dress it up. I'm definitely going to be trying that myself.

--- End quote ---

It works only if writing the summary does not kill writing the actual scene for you.  There are plenty of authors for whom this is the case; I'm somewhere in the middle myself.  Thing is, any scene/chapter I write teaches me a couple of things about the characters and the setting I did not know before sitting down to write it, and these things build up and start affecting the plot, so I may end up somewhere like I expect to but I do not ever get there entirely the way I expect to.

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