Recently I stumbled across a blog post on “How to develop a story for your novel“. The blog’s title says it all for me: ‘Time to Write’.
To backtrack a little, I spent the spring and summer packing up my house. Writing took a back seat, as did visits to the dentist (my abscess tooth moldered in my mouth for a full two months), and anything that didn’t have to do with Moving House.
It struck me that this is a pattern I’ve cultivated in order to avoid loathsome tasks. My mantra had become: focus on one thing, to the exclusion of all else. Did writing a novel fall into the ‘loathsome task’ category? I thought so, until I spent a Sunday morning, recently, surfing the net. Before I knew it, I had read a dozen blogs – all of them were writers’ blogs, as it turned out, instead of the self-help, motivational ones that leave me feeling more drained of motivation than anything.
But after reading Jurgen Wolff’s practical tips on getting unstuck and moving forward with your novel, I realized that writing a novel isn’t what I’m avoiding in my life.
It’s the feelings of not measuring up, not being good enough, and therefore being unworthy. It’s the pain that follows on the heels of these feelings that’s kept me from the keyboard.
Jurgen Wolff has made it easier to stick my toe in the water. I don’t need to plunge headlong into the deep end.
Instead, I can start at the beginning. He suggests asking the question, What if? Start with the bare bones of your character’s life and flesh out a few possible scenarios.
“Sometimes at the end of a string of “what if” explorations you end up with a totally different character or story than you started with. That’s fine, you’re just playing around to explore and you keep going until you have a story you will enjoy writing and people will enjoy reading.”
In other words, what if I could have fun with it?
What Fell From the Sky 