Discouraged in Writing? Start Here!
Let’s see if this sounds familiar: you’re sitting in front of the screen, fingers on the keyboard, and you’re absolutely ready to start writing. You know what you want to write; you can see the scenes play out in your head. You hear your characters’ voices and practically feel their environment. But…getting that information to translate into real words is like pushing on a glacier. You get antsy. You sit there for a long time, or maybe you pace back and forth or go grab a cookie. Maybe you write a sentence, or maybe even three. Perhaps you manage to get a page or more. Or perhaps you walk away from a blank page, promising to come back to it later.
That’s where I was. The first time I really sat down to write a novel, I managed to write a page and a half over the span of several hours. And every moment felt torturous. But the real kicker? When I read what I wrote, I didn’t like it at all. I felt a wave of bitter disappointment. I went back again and again, but I saw no improvement. So, I gave up. Until things changed.
If you’re in this boat, let’s dive into what we can do about it.
Let’s set up a baseline
Every writer has a process. It’s not always the same process for every work, and it might change over time. I can attest to that. But when you start out, it can be hard to identify where your process might be failing you.
When I began, I was already an avid reader, and I’d read Stephen King’s On Writing, Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, and other books on writing. Those books helped, but much of the advice I encountered encouraged a free-wheeling approach, one where you just sit down and write. That didn’t work for me, and it might not work for you, either.
So let’s break this out into four familiar categories, which I’ve named oddly to get an acronym out of it: people (characters), action (the plot), words (the structures and flow of writing), and setting: PAWS. Now you can think of a friendly dog or cat helping out with this. Now, I was tempted to use Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient here, but that focuses more on checking that a story has meaning by determining if elements change from beginning to end. So we’ll stick with PAWS.
People
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that your characters are the most important part of your story. You can make a story driven by ideas, plots, or even places (Isaac Asimov did it), but it’s going to be harder to connect your audience with a mushroom planet or an economy based on balloons without well-formed characters to connect with.
I’ll tell you right now that this was the biggest issue with my first forays into writing. My characters were tools of the plot, they weren’t driving the plot. So how do you find out if you need to work on your characters, and how do you do it? Let’s go through a bulleted list!
Do a character sheet. Here’s a link to one that I made, based on a bunch of sources I cobbled together. You can find others out there, too, that are less complicated or more complicated. This will fill out details about your character(s) that will help them feel more real to you, and that will come out in your writing. And here are a couple of major tips for these character sheets: 1. You don’t have to fill these out completely (I’ve never actually filled one out entirely) - they’re more of a guide to getting a better sense of your character. And 2. Most of the information on these kinds of sheets will never end up in your story: your character is like an iceberg, and all of this extra information is the big part under the surface.
Personality profiles. Personality tests are a big thing: Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the one with the four animals that are always different, even astrology. Whether you believe that any of these work or that they’re all quackery, they’re pretty good tools for character-building, and even for character interaction. So pick a favorite (I use the Enneagram, and I’ll have a post about using it) and go for it. This is mentioned in many character sheets, including mine, but this can be a bit of a shortcut if you find a character sheet daunting.
Run your character through a mundane situation. You can write this, or just run it in your head: the idea is to take a character and walk them through some kind of everyday thing (in your world). Have them go to class, get groceries, shop for a phone, and the like. If you find this easy, and easy to draw out their quirks or traits, you’ve probably got a solid character.
Run your character through a fictional scenario that you’re familiar with. How would your character react if put in Harry Potter’s shoes during a crucial scene? Take one of your favorite books, films, or other media, and put your character into it. What do they do? Do they succeed? How? Do they fail? What’s their reaction? Do this a couple of different ways to stress-test your character and see if you know enough about them.
Write some fan fiction. I’m going to keep coming back to this one, because it actually helped me a lot. When you use characters that someone else has come up with (or invent a character and put them into someone else’s world or plot), it acts as a kind of scientific control, removing variables and letting you play in a sandbox without much pressure (and often with supportive communities). I’ll have a separate post about this subject, especially since it can be a controversial topic in writing.
Action
Do you have your story figured out? Do you have an outline or a summary? Do you know the ending? Or are you playing it by ear and figuring it out as you go? You’ll probably see advice that tells you to do one particular thing, all the way from ‘you must have your entire story planned out with a detailed outline!’ to ‘you can’t be creative if you’re planning things out, you have to let things flow organically!’ So, where on that spectrum is correct? That’s up to you. But it might not be clear yet where on that spectrum works best for you.
When I started, the advice I’d read erred more towards the organic flow. I had a general idea of my plot (mostly clear scenes strung together with fog), but tried to just…go. That didn’t work for me. I needed more structure. I’ve found that now, after years of practice, I can be a little more fast and loose with outlining, especially because I let my characters do some of the legwork for me. So, how do you tell if your plot is discouraging you, and what do you do about it? List time and, spoiler alert, it’s going to have some similarities with the previous list:
Make an outline: okay, this is probably pretty obvious, but there are some sources that will explicitly advise against it. If you don’t like the idea, you can try it visually, make it as simple as possible, or just don’t do it and try something from below.
Make your characters your partners. It’s important for your characters to have agency in a story, rather than have the plot dictate what they do. If you know them well enough, you’ll feel when a plot point isn’t authentic to your characters.