You’re writing a novel. You reach the doldrums of Act 2.
The novel stalls.
What now?
This is why I recommend staying away from LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Microsoft Word for writing. This is one of the two things I teach that always get objections. The argument ALWAYS goes like this:
Me: Never use Microsoft Word for writing novels.
Objection: I’ve used Word for years to write!
Me: Ever finish a novel?
Objection: No…
Me: That’s why.I don’t care which writing software you find the most stimulating, just as long as it has a liquid structure – meaning you can write out of sequence. Scrivener, YWriter, WriteWay, Liquid Story Binder, or SmartEdit Writer – all of them have this. Up to you which one you like.
Ready to plunge boldly where your novel has never gone before?
Skip to Act 3. Get close to the climax of the story. Write that. I did this when I started getting bogged down on Rise of the Romli. If you’ve haunted any of the other articles on my website, you’ll know I started that in 1977.I didn’t want the story to get bogged down. So I jumped to the big space battle.
YEAH!!!!
The rest of the story flowed after that.
I then worked backwards. This scene has to come first, to explain how I got into the battle. This scene in between.
I left off here, at the space dock. Need the weapons test.
Huh. I need to radically increase tension. Rapidly.
So add this, here.
I finished the novel, of course. I think it took 27 days.
If you try this and absoultely cannot write anything in 3 days, abandon it… for now.
Never permanently.
I’ve got ideas for novels that never actually made it past the “writing chapter one” stage. If it dies that quickly, shelve it and move on. If the idea is strong enough, go back after you write something else.
If it never seems to move off the planning stage, dump it. The idea was never strong enough.
When do you decide to dump a story? At what point do you put it aside, and when do you decide to throw it away?
