I’m down to the last chapter and I can’t seem to put it together. The ending is the hardest part. There’re other parts that I can’t seem to get right either. I think at this rate there may be a Wrap Skirt Chapter 4 part 3 LOL.
I’m down to the last chapter and I can’t seem to put it together. The ending is the hardest part. There’re other parts that I can’t seem to get right either. I think at this rate there may be a Wrap Skirt Chapter 4 part 3 LOL.
Could you elaborate a little without giving away too much?
In what way are you stuck?
Do you want feedback on possible directions or just unsure how you want the story to go?
I also often have doubts about where to go with my story, sometimes cutting sections or rewriting to go in a different direction.
Writers all know about getting stuck. Sometimes stuck just means character troubles. The stubborn characters that you bring to life are sometimes resistant to your plot ideas. They just won’t do what you want them to do. They rebel. They mess up your plans. I know it can be frustrating. Sometimes it helps to let them have a day off or just give up and let them do the opposite of what you want to do.
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Or just toss in a random event and let them all react naturally. Extreme weather is an old trick, another can be an accident of some sort or a less dramatic thing could be an ordinary everyday sort of thing like your main character’s little sister is getting bullied in a minor way. You don’t want to completely derail your plot direction so minor events are better but you can always spare a little dialog and a few paragraphs to let them take care of other things in their life. This can be helpful to the story in that we get to see more sides of the character and it makes the story a little less predictable. It also gives the writer less pressure about always being perfectly on track. Less predictability can sometimes give readers more ‘hope’ that certain directions will actually happen. Because now it’s not 100% certain that they will and so when they get close to being on track again the reader’s anticipation builds stronger.
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A writer friend of mine once told me his method of getting unstuck. He just forces himself to write one sentence at a time. Forget everything else except for that one sentence. The theory being thinking about too much at once will bog your brain down too much and make you get stuck. So finish the one sentence. Look at it. Then write the next one. Try to resist looking too far ahead. Trust that things will naturally fall in place.
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Another great writing technique is the divide and conquer method. This is another tip from my friend. Focus on JUST the story first, with handwriting on paper. So just handwrite a page or three and then type it out when you’re done. This makes everything twice as easy as you only focus on the story with handwriting, ignoring all the technical stuff. And then later, when you type it up, you already have the story all thought out so you can focus a lot more on just making nice sentences. I know it seems like twice as much work, but in reality, it’s dramatically faster than trying to do everything at once. Plus it’s just a lot easier.