Many years ago, I started to write a story.
It started out as 'Faith' and was going to be a trilogy of 'Losing Faith', 'Finding Faith' and 'Keeping Faith'. It was appallingly clichéd in places and had so many awful plot devices, it is better if I try very hard not to remember them. And I got stuck.
I tried many times, over the years, to go back and continue. But although I fiddled with this and that, it never worked. That was because it was a truly dreadful piece of work.
So I started again. I dropped some of the characters, and a lot of the plot. And again, it went well for a bit until that day where it all ground to a halt... again.
I think this is a familiar story for many new writers. You have an idea, you start writing it, you grind to a halt. You put it away. Then one day, you come back to it, read it and like quite a lot of what you'd written, but...
By this time, only two character names remained of the original (I can't say characters as they are completely different) and half a chapter of the first attempt. Nothing of the original plot remained; it was that bad. So, I did the sensible thing. I started to look for advice. And I found a lot on YouTube, and there is a lot of writing advice on YouTube: some good, some bad, a lot generic. But it was a good place to start.
And it was a good place to start. Eventually, you learn to discriminate and differentiate between YouTubers and the proffered advice given. And I mean advice. Apart from spelling, punctuation, and grammar, there are no hard and fast rules, because what works for one person/genre/story does not necessarily work for another. It was also a good place to pick up tips for good books to read. And there again, you pick and choose.
I discovered first of all, that I need to outline. And in detail. By this I mean, I really really do need to outline. I had tried outlining before by chapter headings and a paragraph or two to describe what happens, but it turns out that I need to outline to scene level. And bullet point what happens in the scene. Yes, I really need to outline in detail. That detailed.
Secondly, I learnt about story structure. Mine didn't have one. It wasn't going anywhere because it had no direction. K. M. Weiland's books and also Jessica Brody's Save the Cat Writes a Novel were very useful in helping there. So, I worked on the plot. It already had a lot of the essential ingredients, but identifying them helped to spotlight what was missing.
Thirdly, and most importantly, I did not know my characters. I had a vague idea of what they were to do, but not why or even who they really were. Again K. M. Weiland's books have been fantastic there. The characters drive the story and the reason why I was getting bogged down was because the characters had no reason to do anything. So I found out about my characters. I know all about them now, and used ArtBreeder to generate some profile pictures to solidify them in my mind. I now know why Tren sets out and takes the, in retrospect, rather stupid decision he does; he didn't think he really had a choice.
Bringing everything together, and explaining a lot of what I had not understood from the other books that I had read, yesterday I finished Robert McKee's Story. It is fantastic. A lot of lightbulbs went off that illuminated what I had read previously. Most especially, I need to write the beginning. My story starts in the wrong place. I know what my real inciting incident is and I know why my climax has to happen as it does.
And this is where I am. I have a half-written first draft, which is okay as far as it goes (it is lacking, as it turns out, the first act, and the third is only outlined). But I now have the knowledge of the route my characters will take from the inciting incident to the inevitable climax.
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