The idea is there, but the words have vanished

TsukiRyoko said:

I have all these wonderful ideas for my WIP, but the words just won't flow. Everytime I try to write, the words sound so forced. I've deleted mroe than I've written. It's very frustrating. Any tips?

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Just keep writing. This happens to me from time to time--the story sounds so much better in my head than on paper, but I write what I can to get the basics of the scene down (sometimes just bits and pieces of the dialogue) and move on to the next scene knowing I'll be able to work on it during rewrites.

And if it gets too frustrating - go take a long hot shower. I find that by the time the water heater is running out of hot water, I've found the solution to the problem in the scene.

Good luck!

I agree that you should keep writing. I've found myself in this same situation more than I'd like, but I kept writing every day. Even if you're not satisfied completely, there's always editing.

Really, you should try anything relaxing. I like walking through the woods, myself. You could pick up a good book, too.

Mr. Funktastic said:

I agree that you should keep writing. I've found myself in this same situation more than I'd like, but I kept writing every day. Even if you're not satisfied completely, there's always editing.

Really, you should try anything relaxing. I like walking through the woods, myself. You could pick up a good book, too.

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Walking through the woods, going for a bike ride, hot shower/bath, going for a drive at night down the highway with the windows down and the music turned up (I don't do that in residential areas!), reading a good book, watching a good movie, sitting in the middle of a busy mall people-watching....

...all of these have worked for me, but in the end, I just try to keep writing, even if it is garbage, because the rewriting/editing is always easier when I have at least something on the page to work with...

Again, good luck and keep writing!

I use music to write. If the particular artist/album I have on isn't getting me to write, I switch to another band that works for me for that WIP. Might be an easy way to switch your environment while still being at the computer and able to write.

My-Immortal said:

Just keep writing.

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Yup.

TsukiRyoko said:

I have all these wonderful ideas for my WIP, but the words just won't flow. Everytime I try to write, the words sound so forced. I've deleted mroe than I've written. It's very frustrating. Any tips?

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Give yourself permission to write crap, and write as much of it as possible. Don't re-read what you've written, not ever, not even under pain of death, until you've finished the ms. Chances are that in six months time when you finish and finally re-read the crap, it will be less crappy than you remember. If not, you can always fix it in revision. The important thing is to finish.

You need to let the hedge grow before you start pruning it back and trimming it into pretty shapes.

TsukiRyoko said:

I have all these wonderful ideas for my WIP, but the words just won't flow. Everytime I try to write, the words sound so forced. I've deleted mroe than I've written. It's very frustrating. Any tips?

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I feel your pain.

Just throwing your brain at the screen - as per upthread - may not help much. It's hard to leap straight from Really Cool Big Idea down to story, because big struggles/arcs on their own don't easily sustain a continuous narrative.

Looking at published writers, there appear to be two ways of handling this:

Is your story really about the Big Idea, and is there a really obvious struggle involved, e.g. "The USSR invades the West" as in Clancy's Red Storm Rising? If so, then identify the main players and some handy ground level viewpoint characters, and tell the story in short chess-move like scenes. The more chains of move and counter-move you have, the faster the pacing: (Bad guys are sweeping in on the Southern flank! But our spy satellites have seen the troop movement! But it was a feint! But we happen to have Captain Jack Psycho of Special Forces in just the right area! But the bad guys are going to napalm everything!)

Is there no obvious strugggle related to the Big Idea? Or are you really interested in how people experience it? If so, then you need to unpack the idea and find some lower level struggles. For example, much military fiction has a fair whack of man management, Army politics and personal journey. In this case, most of your key scenes will depict clash and twisty-resolution-with-implications.

Maybe you need a break from this particular WIP. You can always come back to it when there's not so much pressure and the ideas start flowing again. WHen this happens to me and it seems like nothing is helping, I put it away for awhile and start a short story or something. The main thing is to keep writing every day, whether its this project or another.

All good suggestions. I've read fiction-writing books that advocate barreling through the first draft resisting the temptation to edit and others who don't leave a paragraph until they're as happy as they can be with it. I fall closer to the latter category; however, if I get on a roll, I do pound the keys madly until I get through the passage so I don't forget the inspiration. I've hit passages that were exceedingly painful to get through and others that just poured out and required almost no tweaking at all (as I'm sure everyone has).

My best ally is time. Set it aside and come back later. If you're on a deadline or relying on your writing for income, you may not have the luxury to do that, but I suppose by the time you're in that situation you've already figured out how to handle high-friction passages. I've set a manuscript aside for a few months at a time and that has helped. You just can't force inspiration...or at least I can't.

Best of luck!

Zolah said:

Give yourself permission to write crap, and write as much of it as possible. Don't re-read what you've written, not ever, not even under pain of death, until you've finished the ms. Chances are that in six months time when you finish and finally re-read the crap, it will be less crappy than you remember. If not, you can always fix it in revision. The important thing is to finish.

You need to let the hedge grow before you start pruning it back and trimming it into pretty shapes.

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What she said.

If I can't think of anything to write on one project, I switch to another. If there's not another one already in progress, I start one.

Sometimes if I'm stuck at a certain point in a narrative, I will break out of the story and write a side sketch involving the characters in that part of the narrative-- something that happened in the past, or perhaps some sort of futuristic speculation. It's most often true that when I get stuck in a narrative, the thing I'm stuck on is just a few lines of dialog or a description of something.

I hope this was helpful!

Agree...

Scarlett has a good point, too. I'll even jump ahead and write another scene, leaving the difficult passage alone completely for awhile. My WIP has several isolated scenes that will be stitched into the whole as I reach the spot in the narrative flow where they belong. The danger in this is in potentially fragmenting the whole, but rounding off the edges with transitions and a little re-editing pretty much solves that problem.

Sometimes, though, it's just a matter of gritting your teeth and grinding through the tough spot, knowing you can always come back and smooth it out on a better day...or trash it altogether! ;-)

TsukiRyoko said:

I never thought of that (I used the same technique for NaNo, but it seemed to reckless that I never would have dreamed of using it for my WIP). It's true, when I'm re-reading my older stories, they're not quite as terrible as I remember them being when I was writing them. I'll definately give it a try. Thank you .

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You're very welcome. I try to pass this advice onto as many people as I can, because it pretty much saved my writerly self from the Great Waste Paper Basket in the sky. Until a couple of years ago I was exactly the same as you, and I never managed to get any further than three chapters into any piece of work. What I had written always seemed so terrible to me, so far from the fantastic images in my head, that I couldn't resist going back and re-working, re-writing, re-editing and revising every word I wrote at least twenty times. By that time, of course, I had polished away any vestige of life or vitality that existed in the story and characters, and also any shred of interest I had in the project. I reckon that re-reading before you're finished is (for a certain type of writer) the kiss of DEATH (death, I tell you!). Finish, finish, finish. Then you'll feel so pleased with your achievement that your self-asteem can stand the process of revision without becoming convinced that the WIP is the suckiest thing that ever sucked in the history of sucky things.