POV: you started your wip a month ago, fingers flying over the keyboard with excitement, writing 20 pages in a single night. You’re overflowing with brilliant ideas, you see every scene playing out in your head. You’re sure that this manuscript will be finished within a month. Then, one quiet morning, you sat down at your desk, pulled up your document, and didn’t know what to do. How are you supposed to continue from here? You read over the last few chapters, cringing as you skim over the pages. You don’t know how to move forward, and you can’t bear to go back. You’re stuck. It’s a terrible feeling. I’m sure you know what it’s like, as well as how hard it is to get out of that sinkhole. Here are 10 techniques to help you get unstuck!
1: Go back to the beginning
Often, a story stalls because you haven’t given your protagonist enough to do. Give them tasks, goals, motivations, anything to keep them on their feet. Jump to the action. Create a quest, even if it seems small. What does your character want? Is there a deadline? What happens if they fail?
2: Look at your protagonist’s backstory
A character’s backstory always provides for extra building material. The more you know about your character, the more you have to write. A character’s history can tell you a lot about why they are who they are now.
3: Throw obstacles in your characters’ path
Ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen to your character right now? And then have it happen. Make sure your character has to fight for what they want. The more you raise the stakes and the more obstacles you throw at your character, the quicker your story will move forward. Not only are obstacles interesting, but they also make characters change and grow.
4: Introduce someone new
This is a great way to shake up the story when you get stuck. Have a new character walk into your main character’s life, making things interesting. Are they an obstacle? Will they help your character achieve their goal? Make sure they spice up the plot enough; you don’t want an unnecessary character just wandering around in your story.
5: Unsettle your character
Every character has a particular way of seeing themselves. They believe things about themselves and that’s who they think they are. But what if something happens that challenges those beliefs? Will they start doubting themselves? Time for an existential crisis? Make the character rediscover who they really are.
6: Jump ahead
Say you’re stuck on page 140. Ever since you started the story, you’ve been really excited to write this one particular scene, but you’d expected it to take place on page 240. How are you going to fill in those 100 pages in between where you are now and where that scene will take place? I advise you to go ahead and write that one scene now. Who knows, you might discover an idea buried in that out-of-order scene that should have happened earlier. Boom, there you have an idea. Finding threads in future scenes might give you background to write earlier in the story.
7: Give yourself a deadline
This method is probably one of the most effective (perhaps most stressful) ways of getting your book written. Ever wonder how published authors get their novels cranked out so fast? Yeah, it’s because there are likely 20 people waiting for their manuscript on September 20, for example. You might not have publishers waiting for your manuscript, but you can set your own deadline. And then stick to that schedule. Setting deadlines really works, that’s why you always write more during nanowrimo than you would without a deadline.
8: Look inward
Many authors write about topics that are personal for them. Something painful, something they could never quite get rid of. A death of a loved one, an addiction, you name it. Writing our own experiences into our book can be extremely painful, but it might be for the better. One reason you may be stuck in your story is because you’re delaying a scene. You don’t want to write it, because you know it’ll hurt. But you’ve got to push through it sometime. Get it over with now and finish that novel. Now I know not all of us are delaying scenes because of some traumatic experience. Even if it’s only because you don’t like writing a certain character, the same counts for you.
9: Take a break
Step away from the desk. Change your surroundings. This always works for me. Whenever I go on vacation, sometimes even when I leave my room, ideas come to me like I wished they would when I’m sitting at my desk. Write down all those ideas, but don’t act on them right away. Give yourself a break when you need it, and that’s more often than you think. Go for a walk and write down all the ideas you think of.
10: Remember why you started
Whenever you feel like giving up on this story, just remember why you started in the first place. You wanted to write this book to portray a theme that’s important to you? To bring something special to the world? There are people out there who need your story. Your favorite book probably went through the same thing, but aren’t you glad the author persevered through it to publish this masterpiece?!
You’re constantly forcing yourself to write it, and you excessively check your wordcount tracker to make sure you’ve hit your daily goal. Its a chore for you to work on it, and you feel guilty thinking about it abandoning it after working on it for so long.
#2. Something feels…off
Whether it’s the characters, the setting, or the plot, there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right, and it keeps bothering you. You want to change it, but changing it means you have to start from scratch, and you don’t want to.
#3. You keep making plot holes
Some amount of plot holes are normal—but the narrative in your story makes no sense. You keep coming up with half-developed ideas and writing them in without knowing the entire context, just to make your wip more interesting.
#4. You feel disappointed in your writing
Your writing quality seems to have degraded, even though you know you can write much better. Its upsetting and demotivating because you don’t put in as much effort or care as much about writing your wip, and you question whether or not you’re actually good at writing at all.
#5. You have many ideas, but you’re afraid to implement them
You have ideas to change your wip completely, but once again you feel too afraid to do it. You don’t know if you’ll be able to stick with the wip for long enough, so you keep procrastinating on it.
In a recent post https://mauesartetc.tumblr.com/post/650139669708800000/what-the-hazbin-umim-supposed-to-feel-bad-for I criticized fans of Stolas from Helluva Boss for being so enamored with his design that they’ve ignored the awful ways he treats those closest to him. It got me thinkin’: If I removed appearances from the equation, could I still convey my own characters’ personalities with text and generic stick figures?
I referenced MIT’s 638 Primary Personality Traits http://ideonomy.mit.edu/essays/traits.html to gather some specific facets of personality for my ocs. Obviously, the list isn’t perfect; some traits are a bit redundant for having too-similar meanings, and a couple aren’t really personality-based (such as “attractive” and “sexy”). I might revise it at some point for a version that’s more useful for character development. But if you have a cast you want to flesh out with unique traits for each character, this is a great resource to start with.
I ended up picking 140 traits from the list, enough to assign ten characters five positive, five negative, and four neutral traits each. (If you try this, you can pick any amount you want, as long as everyone has the same number of positives and negatives so their personalities are balanced.) From there it was just a matter of matching the descriptors with the characters (color-coded, natch) they’d fit best.
I then drew stick figures in poses the characters would make, because, importantly: Character design isn’t just about unique appearances. It’s also about unique poses. It’s all well and good if you’ve avoided sameface/samebody syndrome, but if all your characters pose in too-similar ways, it means they think in too-similar ways. You don’t want your main cast to be a boring hive mind. I also avoided drawing faces, as I wanted these to be as bare-bones as possible, with no form of expression but the body language.
You can also take a trait from one character and ascribe it to another to create a potential bonding experience for them, or pair a trait someone has with someone else’s opposite/near-opposite trait to create conflict.
So yeah, just one method to flesh out characters. Hopefully I was successful in expressing my ocs’ personalities, as well as making them interesting and sympathetic despite the lack of unique appearances. It’s crucial for every character creator to remember that if your lovelies aren’t well-rounded and balanced aspeople, your audience will soon find them grating, regardless of how they look.
(Or at least that will be the case if said audience possesses critical thinking skills and actual standards for their entertainment.)
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One of the things that really winds me up about my own writing is looking back and seeing a multitude of sentences beginning with “I” or “And” or “But”. I’m a messy first-drafter as it is and I do a lot of line edits, but it’s still takes up a significant portion of my time going back to change things.
So, I’m here today to share with you the ways I try to vary my sentence starters and some tips and tricks for drafting and edits”
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We all know why it’s important to vary your sentence structure, and by extent, your sentence starters. Besides obvious intentional things such as creating tension, or specific mood/tone/atmosphere, we should be aiming to varyhow we start sentences to keep the reader engagedand not it being repetitive.
This is especially important if you, like me, write in first person and begin a lot of sentences with things like “I was” or “I am” etc. Or if you have a habit of beginning sentences with characters’ names. But what other options do we have? Here are five general categories that I like to use:
ING WORDS Coughing, she pushed her way through the blaze. Smiling, he leaned in for a kiss.
SIMILIES (and other techniques) Like the chattering of a typewriter, their eyes flittered over the group in front. Sweeping in like a dove, she cut through the awkward conversation.
PREPOSITION (beside, near, with, across, around, out, at, in, etc.) On the starter’s whistle, I pushed forward. Under the heavy fog, the streetlamp glowed valiantly
CONNECTIVE (Because, but, and, despite, after, before, etc.) After he left, I slipped the dagger back into its brace. But I wasn’t about to give in now.
ED WORDS Distracted, she let the ice cream fall from her hands. Stunned by his words, they stopped in their tracks.
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Obviously you can make these examples much more complex and attuned to your own styles! There are lots of other ways you can vary your sentence openers, these are just what I personally use - so hopefully you can get some use of them!
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Hints and Tips!
Use the highlightingtreatment! Go through your WIP and focus on your sentence openers. Select a different colour for each category (Blue for She/He/They/I starters, red for ED Words, yellow for ING words, as an example) and use it to help you see where you may need to add some more variation!
This also is a great exercise to do with a published book you really enjoy or by an author you admire - it’s a great learning experience!
Use a good mix of short, long, and medium sentences! If you find that your writing feels a bit samey or dry, even with varied openers, try changing the structure of the whole sentence itself!
Experimentand play around with word order and structure - free write for a few minutes every day and try something new! It’s all practice and even if it never sees the light of day in your WIP, it’s still a worthwhile thing to do!
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and/or found it useful!
If you’d like to request a particular guide, please pop into my inbox and leave a request!
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
