I have many friends who write novels. I’ve never written one. I’ve started several, but never come close to completing a draft. Today it feels like I’m just not cut out for novel writing. I have a cool character and a cool main idea and a cool setting. I even have some ideas about the main conflict. But when I sat down to write an outline so that I could start drafting it went something like this:
Chapter 1 Cool Character!
Chapter 2 Cool Character arrives in Cool Setting!
Chapter 3 Cool Character meets ancillary Characters!
Chapter 4 – 13 Um… some stuff happens, not sure what, but I have vague ideas.
Chapter 14 Climactic chapter that I’m sure will be Cool! …if only I can figure out what it is for certain.
Chapter 15 Epilogue in which I tie off all those loose ends… once I know what they are.
I wanted to write this now. I wanted to create a book for Link the way I made one for Gleek. But I’m afraid that the ideas won’t connect properly until long after Link ceases to need it.
Sigh. I should probably go back to turning blog entries into essays. At least there my brain seems wired correctly to make useful connections between seemingly unrelated events.
I used to have this problem too. (I may, still: I’m just embarking on writing my comic scripts, and while I know what the ending of the first arc is, I’m not as confident in the middle parts.)
The thing that really helped me is figuring out what needs to happen to each of your characters in Chapter 14. If they’re all important, they’ll all have roles in that chapter.
Then figure out where they start, and how each of them gets individually from start to end. Work backwards if you need to – but figure out how each character develops – both in characterization and plot – over the course of the story.
Then take all of those individual arcs – which may reference each other regularly – and weave them together into a series of scenes, each of which accomplishes some movement along at least one of those paths.
You’ll hopefully end up with a cohesive series of scenes that get your characters from beginning to end, and then you can fill that out into the full novel story if you need to – add in extra obstacles, another supporting character here or there, and so forth. And then, working forward, you may need to edit your later scenes to make them fit with the earlier ones.
I’m about halfway through that process, so I can’t say for certain how well it works – but it seems useful for those cases where you have a beginning, and at least something of an end, and need to figure out what the middle is.
I made a list once of all the novels I’d started to write and hadn’t finished, before I finally finished one. There must’ve been at least ten or twelve. So I definitely wouldn’t let the fact that you’ve never finished one before make you think you can’t finish one. 🙂
But I’m afraid that the ideas won’t connect properly until long after Link ceases to need it.
OTOH, I can certainly believe this. You have way more important things that need to be done RIGHT NOW than I do.
And on a sort of random note: I really enjoy reading your blog. I’m glad people like you exist in the world. It gives me hope for the future. 🙂
I have books like that. They have great characters and great ideas, but they don’t have plots, yet. It usually takes about a year, sometimes two, most rarely four or five, for the plot to connect itself in my brain to the cool ideas. I’ve learned from sad experience that it is a BIG mistake to try to write the book before its properly congealed.
Of course, having been at this for seven years, I have properly congealed books that I have not yet found the time to write. Sadness.
To Quote someone Better Than I Am…
Orson Scott Card once said (well, at least once), that Writer’s Block is often a result of not really believing in what you’re writing at the moment. In his Hatrack River on-line “writing class” posts, he addresses writer’s block specifically by saying:
“The route to a story always leads through causal speculation: Why does this happen? What would the result be? How could you get from here to there? What did he really mean? That sort of thing.
You may simply need to take conscious control of that questioning process, adding the word “else” to the mix – “Why ELSE could this happen?” – so you don’t always settle on the first idea that comes to mind. You keep asking and inventing answers to those questions until you come upon one that rather intrigues you.”
It’s worked for me in the past. Just thought I’d mention it.
This was very helpful. Thank you!
Thanks.
*pouts* But I want it to congeal faster. 😉
Re: To Quote someone Better Than I Am…
Good suggestion. I’ll have to try this.