Creative bottleneck

Yikes, case of over-outlining perhaps. Did you outline yourself into such a corner you can't get out without stepping on the wet paint?

So step on it. Throw out the outline. Write just the first chapter/inciting incident and see where it take you.

Ignore my advice if you are a die-hard outliner.

WriterDude, that sucks, but you already knew that.



Let me ask you this: what's your m.o.? You know better than anybody how these things go. What's worked in the past for you?

Right now, you're blocked, which means you need a mental laxative, so what eases your mind? Maybe crit for a few days. Read. Write something else.

I suspect you're putting undo pressure on yourself to get this thing rolling. In my experience, pressure stifles creativity. Do you find that to be true? If so, perhaps you could table it, let it go for a little while. Give it the time and opportunity to percolate. One day you'll wake up and think, all right, I know what I'm gonna do. You'll be inspired and the words will start to flow.

Or not.

I'm messing with you, WriterDude. They will. Just give it a little time.

WriterDude said:

I am putting myself under too much pressure, I have limited free time and dear god I just realized that writing became a chore. How did that happen?

I need to step away from it. Do something else, guilt free.

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I absolutely agree with this.

I don't know if this will help you, but I find that when I don't let myself write (as opposed to general procrastination, which I am very talented at, though it's not an unusual skill ), suddenly I feel a lot keener. For example, I finished a first draft recently, then did an outline for my first ever NaNoWriMo, and finished preparing it yesterday. As NaNo is just over a week away, I can't write yet (I know I could do other writing stuff, but right now the upcoming project is the only thing I desperately want to write). And I really, really want to - I can hardly wait to start!

Of course, I may get to the first of November and just sit there staring at my keyboard like it's an alien squid, wondering how one is meant to put together all these 'words' that people speak of. But hopefully I will have renewed energy to launch into it.

So I hope you will also re-energise if you give yourself permission (or even force yourself) to take a break!

I don't know if this will help you, but I have had to "reboot" my story a few times because of some change in the plot that affected everything. What I did was to "go back to the beginning" and write up an outline of the section to be fixed, with no regard to what I had already written. Then, I added the overall steps I needed, what the characters needed to do, time periods, etc. I put in approximate dates to keep me on track with things, too. Then, I took the things that I had already written and one-by-one, placed them back into the new outline in the appropriate places. If things had to be rewritten because of the new order of the outline, I did it on the fly.

I ended up with a lot of new sections, which gave me a lot to think about.