Comments on: What do you do with your ideas once you have them?

By: LRK

LRK — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:30:59 +0000

My “ideas” tended to come in the shape of complete scenes, or dialogue exchanges or even a character description, and “what to do” with them, consisted of trying to figure out where they fit, and where to put them – sometimes I didn’t even know who these people were! It was like being given random pieces of a puzzle, and then having to fit them together – it was fun… (sighs nostalgically)

Actually, after a long time (many years), a fresh scene has come to me – and it explains how come some of my characters were going about selling washing-powder door to door…

By: Sabrina

Sabrina — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:06:18 +0000

There are definitely a few of those old stories which are more the ‘miserable middle’ problem–one was 40 pages hand-written, another 90 or so. They may be a combination of both problems. I still enjoy those stories, though, and want to return to them, but I think they’d both need to be rewritten from the beginning. I have definitely felt the middle slump in later (completed) novels and learned to work through them (either skipping ahead or just plowing through).

By: filkferengi

filkferengi — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:31:00 +0000

These posts are wonderful! Have you considered putting them together into a book?

By: pcwrede

pcwrede — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:45:29 +0000

Sabrina – Your unfinished stories may indeed be a result of trying to start writing without having done quite enough development, but you may just be hitting the first speed bump. There’s a point early on in a novel (usually somewhere between Chapter 4 and Chapter 10 for me) where it just slows way down, or even stalls, for most writers. Unfortunately, the only way I know of to get through this is to sit down and do it anyway…and it can be hard to distinguish from the “not having done enough development” problem and the “miserable middle problem.” So the basic technique is: If whatever you are doing does not seem to be working very well, try doing something else (“doing something else” in this context does not mean giving up and switching to another story; it means doing more development if you haven’t been, or just making yourself write, if you haven’t been, or maybe even skipping ahead to a new scene or doing a more elaborate outline or pitching the outline you have – in other words, trying a different working process).

By: Sabrina

Sabrina — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:08:48 +0000

When I first started writing (6th grade through high school), I’d get that initial idea or chracter and just start writing. I have a lot of unfinished stories from that time, because I’d reach a point where I just didn’t know where I was going. Lately, I’m trying to consciously fill in the details, grow the seed, before writing. I’m not a ‘follow the outline’ person, either, but I’m trying to have a better sense of a story before I put down any words.

[As an aside, I've been following your blog for a few months, and I've really enjoyed your posts and your analogous examples (making a soup and the grocery list, come to mind).]