Nothing?
Well, heck, go read a book instead. This one highly recommended:
Home / Meet the Mad Genius Club / Navigating from Writing to Publication
Home / Meet the Mad Genius Club / Navigating from Writing to Publication
Nothing?
Well, heck, go read a book instead. This one highly recommended:
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “No Post?”
I suppose this is as good a time and place as any to ask this.
I’ve finished the first book in my series, started the second and less than three chapters in, I’ve hit a brick wall. I really don’t know how to proceed. I haven’t even gotten any further than setting up a couple of story arc beginnings and fleshed out a couple of minor characters from the first one. I’ve reread the first (and awaiting Sarah’s critique of the first three pages) and I cannot find anything that is getting in the way of where I want to go.
So, are there any methods to get unstuck? Or is it a case of I need to give my brain a couple months rest on this story? Or should I scrap the whole second book and go a it from an entirely different angle?
Do you think you know what happens next?
When I do, what I do is have the opposite happen. My heroine is going into a fair to look for knowledge, and I’m stuck. So instead I have a dragon (introduced earlier actually) swoop down on them and everyone runs off.
YMMV.
I know where they get to at the end of the book, but how they get there. . . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
try a plot skeleton. Figure out the major turning points.
Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
When I know the ending and not much else, I sometimes reverse-outline in Excel. Column B, spell out the pieces of the ending, with the last piece first (may need to do some copy-pasting to get everything the way you want it). Column A, number each piece of the ending, with the final-most piece as one. If the last piece of the ending is “hero walks into the sunset”, then number that as 1. Once you get to the earliest part of the ending (say, “hero kills bad guy”), you can start extrapolating about what comes before it (like “hero carries weapon into presence of bad guy.”)
If you know the beginning steps, start them about twenty plus lines below the ending, with the absolute starting point at the bottom. Don’t number them until you have all the intervening steps filled in (may need to insert a few rows).
Once you have everything filled in and numbered, with chronologically last bit as #1 and chronologically first bit as #20, select column A, click on sort and filter, and select “highest number to lowest number”. Your outline is now in correct order.
I have found that there are two main reasons to get stuck.
Physically–Antihistamines, decongestants, diet soft drinks and insufficient sleep all stop the words.
Psychologically–It’s usually my subconscious saying “This is all wrong, back up and do it right!”
So . . . check your meds, your diet, your sleep habits and ponder what you’ve written so far. *Possibly* just say “I’ll get back to the start in a while. Let’s just see about dropping these poor fools straight into the mess, and write that part.”
Physically I’m OK. Could stand to exercise more but that’s about it. I’ve been sitting on it for about six weeks now. Sounds like I need to start over. Or have Mary’s dragon stop on by.
You might drag out the Hero’s Journey and see how it maps out against the start and finish you got, and maybe get some ideas out what to put in the middle.
OK. I’ll do that.
I tend to set things aside to simmer, then come back to them. But I’ve learned to trust my hind-brain as far as letting it solve things when my back is turned. Yours might not be as helpful. 🙂 *weary kitty grin*