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During the second quarter of the year, I am going to make a more concerted effort to learn how to write long, fictional pieces. I have a number of ideas that I want to develop into full stories, but I find it very difficult to do so.
There are a number of obstacles that hinder my ability to write, but over the next couple of months I am going to methodically try different techniques to overcome them. I'm only a few days into this new endeavour and I've already found a few things that have helped.
I'm not great at thinking of plot lines and mapping out a story. Because of that, I immediately become overwhelmed with the thought of my story being too short and thus frozen before I can even begin. To overcome this hurdle, I tried my hand at what I call storyboarding but probably isn't what actual storyboarding is.
I start with a pad of paper and a pen. At the bottom of the page I write out what I want to happen at the end of the chapter, story, character arc, whatever it may be. It just has to be an end goal. I return to the top of the page and write out where I am. Then I start brainstorming and drawing arrows of one thing leading to another, leading to another, all directed towards the end goal. The arrows end up snaking back and forth and I'll circle chunks and use a 'master arrow' to point to another chunk, and this will all usually span a few pages.
Ultimately, this gives me some sort of skeleton and helps me chip away at something I normally struggle developing.
After I finish storyboarding, I open up a text editor (for me it's either Vim or Kate) and begin outlining chapters. These chapters are by no means what the final chapters will be, but rather finite chunks of plot I can focus on. These chapters are usually the giant chunks of my storyboard I have circled in my notebook.
With my outline I use bullet points to break down the storyboarding points even further. I'll put down any detail that pops into my mind, from dialogue to locations. I find that as I write my outline I get more and more detailed, so I end up with a pretty thorough idea of how I want to write that piece of the plot line.
Now that I have the 'what' established, I need to figure out the 'how'.
Writing is damn hard, y'all. I've always found word counts super intimidating. When I see how many words authors write and aim for, I'm stunned. The idea of writing something that is 100,000 words is mind-boggling.
So, before I jumped into trying to figure out this elusive 'how', I needed to remind myself to ignore the word count. I just needed to write out my chapters one by one. What's important is the plot, not the number of words. When I started to believe what I was telling myself, I found it much easier to calm myself down and slowly chip away at chapters every day. And guess what, I was pumping out around 1500-1700 words a day anyway! Obviously these are pretty low numbers, but atleast it was a step in the right direction.
I have a hard time focusing on a single writing project for extended periods of time. I'm usually good if it's just a blog post where I share my thoughts (i.e. my gemlog), but with longer fictional pieces I struggle.
I was having a really tough time focusing today when I suddenly remembered a technique I used back in my law school days. Back then, when I was studying in the library, I would put on a 6 hour long video that was just the ambient sounds of the TNG Enterprise engine. I find the sound so soothing that I'm able to zone in on whatever I'm doing. I'm quite literally listening to Voyager's engine as I type this.
Music and podcasts really make it hard for me to focus and type, and same with conversations or television playing loudly enough around me.
I was able to power through and knock out a whole chapter today thanks to the Voyager.
I'm sure I'll have more quirks and techniques to share in the future. I love writing so I think it's important I put in the work to practice and find ways to make it easier for me to do the thing I love.