AAAHHH! *Bangs Head Against Wall*

*le Sigh*

My, what a mess I've landed myself! So I started my new project a while ago. I had an idea, I had the characters, and I had the motivation. I even had some pretty cool scenes. And yet, this thing stubornly has refused to pick a place to definitively begin. I seem to be stuck, despite having 14,500 words written in the last week or two. I'm used to just getting an idea, feeling around for a little while (5000 words of actual prose, at most), and then jumping in and steamrolling through. I'm baffled. Am I truely going nowhere?

I'm guessing it's the more inherent complexity with my plot and characters this time. I've generally stuck to one character throughout and possibly switching at times when it just happened to occur to me to make sense, or occasionally just letting the plot flow and follow who's important at the time. For this one I have 4 viewpoint characters I have to get to know and play with, as well as worldbuild (fantasy). The idea is also to keep all my four characters in some way connected to each other, if not always directly. Finding a place in the story that's a good beginning for all of them is perhaps the problem. Maybe I need 5000 words each for 20,000 words before I actually get going.

I'm disliking the ambiguity. Usually I have some idea.

I'm also, since I still can at this point, waivering over whether or not to stick to 3rd person for this one or go to 1st. I love being able to fall in love with characters the way you can in 1st, and the sort of subjectivity of the narrator and getting deep into their thoughts. I'm fairly confident I'd make each narrator unique, because I wrote sections of them in 1st person when I was getting to know the characters. They didn't even come remotely close to sounding the same.

I love 3rd too, though. It lets you see their actual thoughts and actions more, where 1st gets you what they would portray their thoughts and actions as. 1st lends itself better to emotion, 3rd to logic, if I'm expressing that right, which I'm not. But I'm early enough in the development of this particular project I could switch to either, which is driving me even crazier.

UUUUGGGH. [/rant]

I suppose I'll do as I always do and just keep writing and figure it out as I go, since that generally works out eventually, but I'm frustrated.
Writing is hard. How have I not noticed that before now? Anyone else with similar experiences?

Don said:

Take a long walk and ask yourself some basic questions. What's the initial conflict? Where's the point where, as Uncle Jim puts it, a character walks through the stage door and it slams behind them? What's the point where they can't just decide to walk away and have a peanut butter sandwich instead of whatever happens? That's your starting point.

Click to expand...

See, I think that's actually part of the problem. I know where the internal conflict is, and a lot of what's going on is sort of a "no going back now" thing. I could start it anywhere and they all seem to be changeing (some characters more so than others). My problem seems to be picking which conflict to focus the most on, which is therefore where I would start. Currently I have one of my MCs starving himself to death to start with. It's interesting enough, and central to a conflict, but possibly not the one I'll end up focusing on (I actually had a different beginning and realized it might work better to start just a little earlier, because that scene wasn't the most central conflict).
I'm generally around the time where they're about to have the door slammed in their face. What I can't decide, and it looks like I might not be able to until I'm through the middle (which might well become the beginning!), is I guess how close to the door on either side my characters are. I think I might be acting too delicate with the balance of things for writing a 1st draft.

I think I've had this idea running around in my head for 6-8 months, depending, and 2 months at more or less the forefront of my planning, since I was working on 3 trying to decide which to work on next before picking this one. I've definitely got some character's stories more worked out than others.
I completely understand needing a sort of incubation period for an idea. I seem to do them in batches. I'll have a few pets, and nurture them all until one takes over and starts stealing food from the others and demanding I take care of it next. Then when it's a good size I'll set it loose and see what my baby can be. Some ideas need more time than others. Maybe I needed to incubate more... *shrugs*

You guys are all awesome.

I've also been thinking of scheduleing my writing so I do it after excersising. Just something that occured to me might help some. That was more a random thing I wanted to try though.