Write Your Novel Step By Step

by Melanie Anne Phillips
creator StoryWeaver, co-creator Dramatica

Step 2 - Stuck for Ideas?  Try This....

Suppose you don't have a killer concept that came to you in a flash of inspiration (as described in Step 1).  I know, I know - every one of your ideas is killer.  But, surprising as it may seem, most authors come to a story with a more general sense of what they want to write about, and some with hardly an idea at all.

They might have a couple of lines of dialog they overheard at a restaurant which have the potential to turn into a knock-out scene.  They might have a little self-contained action sequence that is just so cool it's worth building a whole story around.  They might have a message, a particular subject matter, a setting, an historic period, or even an original style of writing that popped into their heads and it is enough, in and of itself, to turn that ever-present spark of a desire to write the Great Novel into a raging inferno of authorly yearning.

But where do they go from there?  No matter how impassioned you may be about the bits and pieces you'd like to whip up into a great fiction, that is often the point at which inspiration fails and the ideas stop coming.

Raw creativity is all about coming up with ideas from scratch - in other words, making something from nothing.  But when ideas won't come, we are suffering from the all-too-familiar "writer's block."

Though creative blocks aren't exclusive to writers, (i.e. a batting slump or derivative music), writers have to be more continuously creative, moment to moment, in a way not many other professions require.

Even more common are the less extreme cases wherein ideas come like molasses.  Sure, you make progress, but the pace of it is so excruciatingly slow!  Worse, the more you try to force it along, the more the pace declines.

If you've ever suffered through a creative bottleneck or a complete shut down, fear no more!  Here in Step 2 of How To Write Your Novel Step by Step we'll provide you with a whole toolkit of surefire techniques for banishing creative blocks and slowdowns once and for all.

To begin with, there are two causes of writer's block which, when remedied, open the valve to full creative flow:  One, a mental obstacle to creativity and two, a lack of fresh input.

In the first case it is as if a mechanism in the mind has seized up - not unlike a stuck gear.  Other mental processes may be working just fine, but the place that generates the particular kinds of ideas you need won't budge.

This is, in fact, the way half of all cases of writer's block feel while they are occurring: as if something in your mind that used to work has frozen in place, put up a moat, or become impenetrably dark.

The second type of writer's block feels like a great emptiness, as if the mind is a desert in which nothing can grow - the mental equivalent of a blank piece of paper and you're fresh out of mental pencils.

In this version of the writer's block issue, the mind's machine is running just fine - like a windmill in a favorable breeze.  Problem is, there's no grain for the mill to grind.

Were going to solve the first of these issues here in Step 2, and then tackle the second one in Step 3.

Writer's Block Type One: The Seized-Up Mind

To understand how to break-up this kind of mental log jam, we first must understand how it happens in the first place.

Creativity is half intellect and half passion.  Each is a separate mechanism and, left to its own devices, functions quite fine.  But our minds mesh the two together, one driving the other, then the other way 'round, all in the hopes of reaching a consensus.  When it works, we spout brilliance.  But when the results of these two parallel processes are in conflict or contradiction, and when repeated attempt to resolve that differential fail, the force of both processes collide like two meshed gears trying to move in opposite directions, and the flow of ideas grinds to a halt.

The solution to this problem, surprisingly, is stupidly simple:  Don't use both processes together.  Now what could I possibly mean by that?  It's like this....

Use your passion to generate ideas and your logic to analyze them.  In other words, give yourself a temporary mental lobotomy and let each process work on its own, one at a time, alternating between the two rather than trying to force them to work together simultaneously.

Here's how it works....

Expanded from "The Creativity Two-Step"

When you find yourself stuck at the beginning of a project or some point along the way, as counter-intuitive as this may sound, shut off your creativity completely - it's not getting anywhere anyway.  Just put on pause any efforts to come up with solutions and new ideas for a bit.  You'll come back to that later.  For now, you need to stop beating your head against a wall and clear your mind.

A lot of writers have learned to "just walk away" from their story for a while, but that doesn't really work.  Usually, the creative block is still there whenever you return to try again.  Sure, the idea behind taking a break is that you'll think about other things, get new mental patterns going, and come at the problem from a new direction that bypasses the mental obstacle.  Unfortunately, this does not work all that often or all that well.

We're going to try something else instead.  Once you've stopped "working" on the problem creatively, you need to shift from that passionate state into a logical one and immediately approach the problem analytically without missing a beat.  In other words, you're going to shift gears, rather than shut off the engine.

To do this, try to stop looking at your story as the author and try looking at it as if you were a reader or part of the audience.  This helps you take a more objective view of whatever you've written or developed so far and makes it easier to stop being overly passionate about your own work and adopt a more analytical perspective.

Once you are thinking analytically, re-read through your material and scan for holes and inconsistencies, just like an audience would.  If you really were the reader rather than the writer, you'd have no idea about what you intend to do - just what's actually presented on the page.

Since it is a work in progress, there's going to be a lot of material missing.  But rather than try to fill it creatively, just describe what isn't there.  Do this in the form of analytical questions.

For example, if you wrote "A Marshall in an Old West border town struggles with a cutthroat gang that is bleeding the town dry." and then got stuck, you might come up with a list of questions as follows:

Certainly, you could come up with an almost endless list of questions about what you don't know about the embryonic story concisely described in that one little sentence.  In fact, you might want to try this right now on your own story just to prove to yourself that it isn't too hard to think of a whole variety of questions that spring from just about anything you might write.

It's really pretty easy.  After all, it is always a lot easier to criticize than to create, and if you remove yourself passionately from your story you can tear it to pieces just like your readers or audience will.  But you don't have to be that hard on yourself.  And you don't even have to creatively try to define what ought to go in a hole.  Just read what you've written and ask questions the way you might if you were playing "Twenty Questions."

Now for step two.  We're going to move past your creative block by using each question as a branching point for your next step of story development.  To begin, its time to shut down your analytical side and re-start your passionate, creative side.

To do this, take each question, one at a time, and see how many different answers you can devise with absolutely no deference paid to whether your answers are logical or practical.  Don't allow yourself to even consider how each answer might fit in with what you've already written or what you have in mind.  If you were to think about that you'd be trying to use logic at the same time as passion again and you'd grind to a halt once more.

So, just throw caution to the winds, pull out all the stops and write as many different answers to each question as you can.

Here's an example:

Take the very first question, "How old is the Marshall?"  You might come up with a list of answers similar to this:

While some of these answer may, at first blush, appear ridiculous or unusable, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Fact is, most stories are pedestrian simply because they stick to the common, expected, tried and true elements.  Writers often try to play it safe by toeing the line.  But a story written in that manner has nothing about it that stands out and makes the story special and memorable.  It becomes nothing but another bland, sausage-machine crank-out, with no personality at all.

Having come up with your answers, it is time to alternate back to logic again and ask questions about each one, just like we originally did with the first little snippet we analyzed.  So, turn off the creativity again and put on your objective hat.

For an example, lets take answer "c" - the Marshall is 86 years old.  What questions come immediately and easily to mind about an 86 year old Marshall?

Here's some examples:

c. The Marshall is 86 years old.

Again, there must be a hundred questions you could ask right away about an 86 year old Marshall.

Now, switch off the logic and switch on the creativity again.  For example,

5. What kind of gun does he use?

As you've no doubt figured out by now, you could go back and forth like this forever, branching wider and wider with each series.  On top of that, you could go back to your questions from the first branch point and follow each one just as far into detail or farther.  For example, question 2, "How much experience does he have" could easily have several interesting answers, each of which could lead to more questions.

The best part of this system is that you spiral into minutia of little details when you keep branching off, you just come up with more and more quality material of the first order with which to flesh out your story.

Also, though we have focused initially on the Marshall, you might have focused on the plot or the theme as well.  And if you develop those areas of your story using the same technique is doesn't take long before you have more material than you'll every be able to use in a story.

Branch by branch you develop your story's world.  When you finally come up for air (or lunch) you'll find that you've completely side stepped your writer's block simply by employing your logic and your passion in alternating sequence, rather than at the same time.

 Looking ahead to Step 3

That may be all well and good, say you, but what if I can't come up with any ideas at all?  What if I have Writer's Block Type Two - The Empty Mind?  In the next step, we'll provide you with sure-fire techniques to get ideas popping up in your mind without any effort on your part whatsoever.  (Don't worry, you won't start hearing voices, save for your own Author's Voice.)

Write Your Novel Step By Step

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About Dramatica and StoryWeaver

What They Do

Dramatica is a tool to help you build a perfect story structure.  StoryWeaver is a tool to help you build your story's world.

Dramatica focuses on the underlying logic of your story, making sure there are no holes or inconsistencies. 

StoryWeaver focuses on the creative process, boosting your inspiration and guiding it to add depth, detail and passion  to your story.

How They Do It

Dramatica has the world's only patented interactive Story Engine™ which cross-references your answers to questions about your dramatic intent, then finds any weaknesses in your structure and even suggests the best ways to strengthen them.

StoryWeaver uses a revolutionary new creative format as you follow more than 200 Story Cards™ step by step through the story development process.  You'll design the people who'll inhabit your story's world, what happens to them, and what it all means.

How They Work Alone

By itself Dramatica appeals to structural writers who like to work out all the details of their stories logically before they write a word.

By itself, StoryWeaver appeals to intuitive writers who like to follow their Muse and develop their stories as they go.

How They Work Together

But, the finished work of a structural writer can often lack passion, which is where StoryWeaver can help.  And the finished work of an intuitive writer can often lack direction, which is where Dramatica can help.

So, while each kind of writer will find one program or the other the most initially appealing, both kinds of writers can benefit from both programs.

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Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips - Owner, Storymind.com, Creator Storyweaver, Co-creator Dramatica