How to Write?

[Namb]

I wrote my first story when I was 12 years old or about 30 years before word processors. At the time I had to be letter perfect. Mistakes were difficult to correct and if I had to go back and "patch" a previous section of the story, there was no easy way to do it. Of course there were scissors and tape (the original cut and paste).

Word processing makes the process so much easier. You don't have to get it on the first take. Get on the horse and keep writing.

For most of my stories I don't have to do a lot of revision, but then sometimes, I do have to do a major rewrite. Sometimes, I throw the story on the "get back to it someday" pile - I have hundreds of these stories dating back to the 1990's. This is my junkyard, and like its mechanical counterpart, I sometimes raid it for spare parts. Some scenes and ideas are worth recycling.

Most of my stories are inspired by pictures: not even pornographic pictures necessarily. I wonder what is going on here? How did this situation come about? Where does it go from here?

In his book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," Stephen Covey advises as his Second Habit: "Start with the end in mind." This works well in business, but to tell the truth, I rarely know how my stories will end when I start them.

I do limit myself to about a half dozen main characters, each with a distinct personality. Then I do like Peter Sellers does in some of his movies, play multiple parts. I take on the personality of my characters, they become my arms and legs and mouths. They do not always stick to the script. As I start a conversation with the other characters and they respond, they sometimes take the story in a direction I did not intend.

So I can be a submissive boy or a dominant girl and enjoy the excitement of being humiliated and the thrill of dominance.

As a child, I never had an imaginary friend. As an author I have hundreds of them. I don't know if writers have to have multiple personality disorder, but it works for me.

So my main problem with writing is how to wrap it up or end it. Most of my stories have room for sequels.

Writing my stories takes anywhere from about a week to a month or in some cases, years. I've written short one-offs (which is how I started) to multiple part sagas.

[Executionus]

I do limit myself to about a half dozen main characters, each with a distinct personality. Then I do like Peter Sellers does in some of his movies, play multiple parts. I take on the personality of my characters, they become my arms and legs and mouths. They do not always stick to the script. As I start a conversation with the other characters and they respond, they sometimes take the story in a direction I did not intend.

So I can be a submissive boy or a dominant girl and enjoy the excitement of being humiliated and the thrill of dominance.

As a child, I never had an imaginary friend. As an author I have hundreds of them. I don't know if writers have to have multiple personality disorder, but it works for me.

I've mentioned before that this is my exact process. I will have conversations with myself at work, in character as multiple people (including changing my voice). I have been caught doing this before. My managers all think I'm insane.

[neverdoubted]

Here are my two biggest struggles. I work very hard to avoid this, but often fail.

1. Introducing too many characters and too quickly with the expectation that the reader will remember them all. I'm not good at remembering names and people, so I try extra hard to emphasize a trait or title that would make them easy to place in relation to the protagonists. You've lived with them all in your head, but the reader is just meeting them for the first time. Other than the protagonists, I try not to have more than about 1 other named character per chapter. If I'm going to introduce a new repeating character, I will often have another one exit the story to make room.

One example is that comes to mind is The New Rules by superevil7. Don't get me wrong, that story is a masterpiece and 10 times better than anything I could ever write. But I felt like I needed a glossary of characters to keep up with them all.

2. Too much dialog. Dialog is maybe the hardest thing to write well. It's just not descriptive enough for a written medium. And too much of it can totally derail a story. If you have a scene with lots of dialog, try to re-imagine it to tell it some other way.

The Tennis Captain by jastes22 is one example of this phenomenon. It's clearly popular and is probably a great story, for all I know. But I got overwhelmed by the amount of dialog going back and forth (like a tennis ball, hehe) that I gave up and moved on.

My point is, there are some really great authors on this board. There are also some really interesting ideas or seeds of amazing stories which I just can't get into because one or both of these is a distraction.

~ ND

[TeenFan]

I also have the long drawn out, multi-chapter type stories that grew larger from a simple idea.
At the same time, I have ideas for short stories that stay short. I found a way to do these short stories by giving them to a single character, a poor
lad who has to suffer all kinds of embarrassing moments. It's just easier giving all these mishaps to a single character and doing it all under one
topic.

[edithdick]

So, I have an idea now, that I think I can make a story out of, it needs a bit of research, but, its simple stuff, but, to ask the writers here who actually finish stories, should I just mark out an hour daily 21.45 to 22.45 to write/research and be strict, or just try leaving it until a Sunday and doing a 4/5 hour stretch in the evening, when I do nothing but surf the web and spend time with my friend Jack (although, I may know him enough to call him John) Daniels and self edit during the week (once).

How did your story turn out?

[dublinjohn]

So, I have an idea now, that I think I can make a story out of, it needs a bit of research, but, its simple stuff, but, to ask the writers here who actually finish stories, should I just mark out an hour daily 21.45 to 22.45 to write/research and be strict, or just try leaving it until a Sunday and doing a 4/5 hour stretch in the evening, when I do nothing but surf the web and spend time with my friend Jack (although, I may know him enough to call him John) Daniels and self edit during the week (once).

How did your story turn out?

It died a death in the wilderness

[edithdick]

It died a death in the wilderness

I have a few stories that are lingering there as well. I feel like if you don't love the story you are writing, you'll never have the motivation to get around to finishing it. My advice it to noodle around with the story until you either find an angle that is so compelling that the words gush out of you until you can't stop writing it... or you will eventually get so sick of thinking about it that it leaves you alone forever.

[CaughtOfLore]

This has been happening to me for the past six months. I'd been blaming having a lack of decent chunks of time where I could get back into "the zone" to finish What A Time To Recall - which is true to a decent extent... but not the full reason.

The truth is, I'm just not excited by that story anymore. The frustrating part of it is that I can see that it's 90% there. But I've been thinking that for months, and every time I go "Right, you sit there and finish this thing!", I find myself writing bits that I then realise don't really work, or rewriting bits that were already written to make them more cohesive, and suddenly I'm burned out on the idea again, with the story still at the 90% point.

Sorry to those who I've assured that the story is continuing soon... I'm sure it will come eventually, but "soon" isn't even something I want to tie myself down to anymore. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but when it does, it'll be a surprise to everyone - myself included.

For now, I've got to try doing some other writing. I've been paralysed by that one story for too long, and not been able to write anything else because I had this thought in the back of my mind that people would be annoyed. Annoyed that I was working on something else, when I could have been finishing a story they had invested time in reading up to this point.

And that might be true for some people, but I think I still need to give myself that permission to write something else for now.

[edithdick]

This has been happening to me for the past six months. I'd been blaming having a lack of decent chunks of time where I could get back into "the zone" to finish What A Time To Recall - which is true to a decent extent... but not the full reason…

I feel like I’m in the same boat. I have several stores started, each of which has an interesting plot in mind, but writing feels like work now. I took several months off to regroup, but now I’m having trouble finding the right mood to write well.

How do you pros keep going? Or better yet, what helps you get into a writing mindset?

[TeenFan]

When a story I'm working on starts to bog down, or feel like a chore to add the next chapter to, I set that one aside.
It's easier for me to work on what interests or excites me the most at the moment, and sometimes that means I have to put in the first couple
chapters to a new story....so now I have five or six current stories in progress...lol.

But as long as I'm putting out a chapter every day or every other day on a story (any story) I'm glad about getting something done.
Something put out that I'm happy with is better than forcing a story to continue when I don't know exactly what I want to do with it.

I don't recommend trying what I do. I doubt many people could juggle so many stories at the same time, but I post an update almost daily and
my "neverending" Beach story is at 52 parts and only around eight hours have passed in the story. That story is sort off written in "real time"
meaning if it takes three minutes to read the chapter, then basically that is the amount of time has passed in the story.

So I guess my advice is to write about whatever one finds most exciting to write about. Don't wait to know how a story ends before starting or
you may never get started.