So, your daily writing time has begun and you're perched over your keyboard like a vulture observing a thing expire. How do you get started? What tricks work for you? I like to write the first sentence of my next piece at the end of the previous day's writing time. I make sure it has a good hook. For me, getting started is all about that first sentence. If I know a good song that captures the mood I'm aiming for, I'll play it.
My schedule is all kinds of crazy. It's really whenever i feel like it, really.Once i start College, Deepening my Social Life, Dating, Composing more sophisticated Music, Directing Films, Developing Games, and Running my Production Business i'm going to be too swarmed to have a schedule. It's going to beat very erratic times, lol.
I think you've misinterpreted Justin's question, Fullmetal Xeno, but anyway... My trick is similar to yours, Justin. I purposely force myself to stop when I'm in full flow (so long as I've had a good length session). That way when I sit down down the next day, I just have to read over the last couple of paragraphs and I can pick up exactly where I left off.
I tend to have to be triggered by some inspiration to write because I have a strangely spiritual relationship with my characters. Attempting to force them to speak is to, in a way, desacralize them. It’s very easy for me to force myself to work on technical stuff timelines, making sure there is continuity in what I’ve already written, correcting small errors, etc. I do try to listen to music, meditate, and take walks. Flowers play heavily into my current WIP and one fell on my head while I was reading the park. That was helpful!
I start off with an outline so I can get a feel for what makes sense given what my characters are doing. I weigh that on what I want and work out a compromise. Then I write.
I used to stop mid-sentence so I'd at least have a few words to write the next day. It's tricky, though. Sometimes I'd come back and wouldn't remember where the sentence was going and then I'd get stuck trying to remember. So, I started going back and rereading what I'd written the day before, but sometimes I'd get bogged down in rewriting instead of moving forward. Now I just sit down, clear my mind, glance at the outline and start typing without knowing what I'm about to write. For some reason, this works well for me. Even if I throw out the first few sentences, I'm back into it within the first half hour.
What generally helps me is to get an idea of all the things I want to happen then type out what those ideas be it a big event half way through the story, a plot twist or a romantic moment for example then work your way to those events (adding or removing them as you feel necessary) with the characters to make the outline then go back over it to make sure it all makes sense.
Aargh!! Why do people skim read the first post of threads? Or even worse, base their answers on the (irrelevant) replies given by others? There's only one or two posters in this thread who have understood what the OP is asking. The rest of you are just explaining how you generally approach your writing. That's NOT what the OP is asking!
I used to suffer from brain fade a lot when trying to get that daily session started. Then i worked out that i was lazy, that my inner voice was complaining about having to dive straight into the hard work of plot and character development. So now i sit down and start typing not the next scene, but the next fun scene. So what if i've skipped a few scenes? I can add them later, and i can sort out discrepancies in plot and so on, later. This works for me and i've found that i now have a more relaxed approach and the words do flow a little bit more easily.
I've heard it said many times that if a scene ain't fun to write, it doesn't belong in the novel because it won't be fun to read.
I used to do the half sentence thing. But that was when I was a pantser. Now I'm a heavy outliner. I have a notebook full of what I want to happen in each chapter, plus a generic outline to keep me organized. So when I go to write each morning, I literally just sit down, look at my outline to see what scene is next, and start writing. I don't care if I'm feeling creative or not, or how pretty the words are. I just write. I typically don't stop until I'm starting to lose my focus.
I already answered the OP's question because there aren't any 'tricks" to my writing and getting started is just putting pen to paper. I'm not an Istari Wizard that has a magic ball that helps put words on paper, just an average person who writes. Thank you for calling everyone's posts irrelevant because you don't know what secular responses are. You can get angry all over a thread all you want, but you're not going to treat other people with that attitude here.
