In my current WIP, I have written and outlined all of the BIG events, but now I don't know what to write for the parts in-between. Does anybody have any suggestions?
You are going to hate me for this but... Just Write Don't worry if it's a steaming pile of horse manure. That's why they call it a rough draft. Stuff will come to you as you go, little lights will turn on. Returning you to earlier parts of your story. Also, you'll be doing a lot of editing, no book is flawless, and 1st rough are a pale echo of the finished work. So write, even if it's generic garbage. Fine tuning will come later in the edits.
I agree with the "just write" comment. And that by itself can be productive. One of the first authors I ever met stated that he had a white board. And he just wrote down things on the white board. It was every idea he could think of, no matter how crazy. He just wrote them out. Then when he got a good number of ideas on that board, he would start crossing some of them off, starting with the most outlandish one. Eventually, after some time, he settled on one idea he's going to try. Note, I said "Try." He may or may not stick with that idea with additional rewrites. There's also a technique of trying to figure out the what and whys. For example, you have two scenes, one taking place in Setting A and the other takes place in Setting B. So you start with a simple idea, like "They'll take a horse to Setting B." Okay, how do they get the horse? "They buy them from this one guy." Do they have any money? "No." How do they get money? And you just keep snowballing along that logic until you reach something that you can work with.
To sort of piggyback off of this, I had a scene in my WIP, wasn't sure how to get through it. I had three different ways, so I wrote three different scenes. I then determined which one had the most impact and ramifications for the story. Another time, I had a character who was supposed to die, but when it came time to kill the character I found myself unable to do so, LOL. So I had to determine if the story benefited more from this character being alive, and it did
Yeah. And that's important too: You can change your mind! I don't know why we tend to cling onto ideas that just don't work. Maybe because we know that sometimes changes will require a massive overhaul, where we might take out scenes and characters we loved.
It honestly depends on how you work. Personally, I look at what I have and use "yes, and" or "no, but" to figure out what goes in the middle. What are the consequences of particular actions that would lead the story onward? It's all part of the brainstorming process.
Oh man! I had to massively overhaul my books many times, lol! Especially, when I realized some of the child characters we're supposed to be teenagers Edit: I also had it happened the other way as well, where I was writing a child character who I thought was 8, but when I redid my math, the Child was 3 years old. But due to his important parts, I just had him Born sooner
it also helps to bounce ideas off of people. I was literally in this position lat night, so i called my 17 year old sister, explained what happened so far in my WIP. Though her ideas were as could be expected of a 17 year old ("why dont you send your MC on a mushroom induced hallucination????"), telling someone else about the events and the story so far, and just hearing it out loud was helpful. She had some good suggestions too, as we started talking about the setting (a tropical island) and the plants and wildlife in that setting. It gave me ideas for future scenes and unblocked my block.
Thank you all so much for your help! I've taken your advice and I've just written (even though it sucks)! Now I am able to piece together different parts of my story and I'm very happy, thank you again!
with the story I'm currently working on, I want ad, don't worry too much about order either. In my current rough draft, I know there are scenes out of order. I'm writing by hand so I can't fix it, but made notes forum to fix in the revision So, you'll find some scenes may work better in other parts vice versa.
That's awesome that you don't care the first draft sucks. They always suck. Because you don't know how the story goes, you haven't figured out the most effective way to write it.
You may find that writing the 'big scenes' is all you need to do ...at least for starters. Sometimes all you need is to engineer a quick transition between them. (Often at the start of a chapter, to let the reader know what the setup for this big scene will be, or to tell the reader what the characters plan to do 'next' at the end of a chapter.) Think of it as if you're writing in your personal diary about what was important about 'yesterday.' You are going to write the big events, or the ones that mattered. You're not going to write about all the minutes between, are you?
I also agree with just write and everything else Rockatansky said. I tend to write and then rewrite everything up to 4 times on average. Of course, once I realised this, my tendency was to try and think out the first 3 times so I did not have to write it over and over. Unfortunately I am not that clever and it appears I just have to adhere to the normal creative process and keep doing it until it is right.
After I wrote the big scenes, to develop the in between scenes I asked 'what has to happen after scene 1 for scene 2 to occur?'. Than I started filling in the blanks.
