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My ideas for stories are all too scattered

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morngnstar

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Put pen to paper. Ideas swirling is nice and all, but they won't develop if you leave them as abstract ideas in your head. Write a scene.

IOW, you think you are an outliner, but try pantsing.
 

D. E. Wyatt

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To reiterate what others have said, any time an idea pops in my head I write it down. The Series Bible for the low-fantasy swashbuckler I'm working on has an entire section just for ideas I've had over the course of the day. Some of them I could potentially build an entire story around, some might be random character moments I may work into another plot. The important thing is to get them down.
 

Woollybear

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I've got the kind of writer's block where I come up with all kinds of snippets of plot points or character attributes, but they never come together as a plot. And, there are some additional things going on in my writing and life that exacerbate this...

1. I'd been working on two memoirs for some time, and have one at the finished stage and the other at second-draft stage. I don't know that either is perfect, but I said everything I wanted to say (satisfying). And now I can't come up with a new idea.
2. I want to do fiction next, and "coming up" with a new world / characters is a different thing than memoirs.
3. I used to be a journalist, which is all about describing the stuff you see and hear in an objective sort of way, which turns in to a big boring infodump if you attempt to do it in fiction.
4. I'm starting a new job on Monday. First time working in four years. (Yay! my kid is old enough for me to do that!) So that's going to wreak havoc on my writing time. But I still want to have that lovely "developing the story" feeling in my mind where I can think about what I want to write the next morning.

So I guess what I'm asking is how do you get from snippets flying in your head to a "the protagonist faces such-and-such a challenge and must..." real premise?

Sorry if I'm not making much sense, but "not making much sense" is how I ended up in this forum. :)

I haven't read the other answers. i'm writing my second fiction story.

I think I had to just start writing with the knowledge that what I wrote would be revised, and I probably started the first novel in six or seven different ways and the second novel (so far) in four different ways.

Give yourself permission. Get into the meat of it. Let the story get onto the page and allow yourself to not worry about future days of revision. Enjoy the increasing word count and discovering the freedom of allowing whatever character to do whatever fun thing. The day will come when you need to meet someone else's expectation of 'story' so for the time being just enjoy creation.

If you don't like that answer, then my other answer is to buy a book on story structure and plot your novel. Useful metrics include:

20-30 speaking characters
~100,000 words
Three or four acts broken into 'protagonist's normal world (~20%)' 'new identity and growth (~70%)' and 'climactic confrontation with antagonist (~10%).

You can go either way. :) Or a combo.
 

Layla Nahar

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A story is about a person. This person has a problem and the steps* they take to solve that problem are the events that make up the story.

*also included therein are the steps the opposing force takes in pursuit of its own goal.

(opposing force can be a person, or in some stories not a person but a force of nature, 'To Build a Fire' frex)
 

Odile_Blud

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Are you a pantser?

I can't tell you about how you approach writing, but I can tell you that I used to have a huge problem with writer's block yet I had so many ideas in my head. For me, I had a bunch of scenes and knew what I wanted to happen in the story, but I had a hard time ordering them or getting from point A to point B. At that time in my life, I was very against the idea of outlining. To me, it sounded too technical and I felt like it took away the creativity and imagination. Boy was I wrong!

For my last novel, I took the scenes that were in my head, and I organized them. So while all the planning was still done in my head, I wrote the scenes on paper that allowed me A) organize them and see what order I need them in and B) if there were any issues as far as getting from one point to the next I could plug in a new scene that moved the plot along and pulled me out of writers block. I finished the novel in a year which says a lot for me because I am a very slow writer, also it reads very organized and I had little to no issue with writer's block.

I'm not saying outlining or ordering your scenes on paper is for everyone, however, if you haven't tried it yet, I certainly encourage you to just to see if it helps any. It helped me A LOT. Everything that I write, I use this method now.
 
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