You think writing is hard? It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is follow this procedure and you are guaranteed a story, no matter what.
Inspiration
Obviously, you need a reason to begin writing. You don’t wake up one day and say, I am going to write a story for no reason. For most people that means getting inspired by something. A song, a poem, an article, a book. Symbolically, you are touched by your muse.Motivation
After you are inspired, you need to be motivated so you can actually sit down to write. You don’t write a story every single time you are inspired. For most people motivation comes in the form of short term reward. Having a job for example, rewards you with a salary at the end of every month. For writers, this is limited to instant gratification by having fun while writing, to knowing they will be paid or get lots of likes out of it. Ps. Many writers have writing as their job, so their gratification is money.Persistence
Chances are, you won’t finish your story in an hour. Or a day. Or a week. It might take months. Or way longer. Being motivated works only for short term rewards. What happens when you run out of them and you are still far from over? You give up. This is when you need persistence, aka long term rewards. It’s when the destination is more important than the journey. For most, that means a story does not feel rewarding if it’s not finished. For others, it can simply be stubbornness to finish it, just for having invested so much time in it already. For a few, it’s the promise of publication.Tribute
All this talk about persistence is fine, but what can you do when you are stuck? You want to write, but you don’t know how. You reach a point and you have no idea how to continue. This is where tribute comes in; which the less sophisticated amongst us call rip-off. Many writers begin by making imitations of pre-existing stories. Others do fanfiction. It’s not the best solution in terms of creativity, but it’s a secure way to keep you going. Are you stuck? Get a similar story to yours that you really liked and rip the living hell out of it. Replace names and locations, use synonyms for adverbs, shuffle the events. There, you got yourself a book that is strangely enough as long as the one you used as template.Editing
Of course nobody should settle for imitations or badly stitched together stories. Many times it’s the editing that does the trick. Once you are stuck or over with paying tribute to another story, go back to the beginning and read the whole thing. Change anything that feels off. In most cases, you improve spelling and prose. In others, you find ways to expand or clarify certain scenes. You might also think it’s terrible and you should burn it. Never do that because you fall victim of lack of persistence. Go back a few steps and try anew with more… tribute.Visualization
I don’t include it in editing, although it’s the same thing but takes a lot of effort and is usually going unnoticed. It’s when you have a way to “see” a scene you wrote as if it’s a movie. Your imagination is the thing everyone uses, but that means nothing for the inexperienced mind which has a hard time to figure it out. Visualization is vital for seeing how a scene plays out in real time. Most writers don’t realize (or care) about the length of dialogues or descriptions, resulting to a ridiculous long period of time where time seems to stand still while the characters talk, or do something way too fast compared to others around them. Although not a must to keep in mind for writing a story, it is vital for telling a properly paced one, and by extension a more plausible one. Many details are often added for fleshing out a scene, making it more elaborate, realistic, or plain memorable. Without details, a story feels empty, hollow, generic. Visualization is the key for not just writing a story, but for writing a worthy one.Feedback
Meaning, editing from the perspective of others. Although this does not have to do with writing, it’s still a way to improve or continue a story. The opinions of others should be giving you ways you can tweak parts that feel iffy. They should never dictate your prose or plots though, since you are the writer, not them.Planning
Once you keep going and you seem to be doing a fine job, it’s time to start planning ahead. It sounds like this is what you should be doing from the very beginning but as you will realize eventually, writing rarely follows the storyboard. It’s something you should do once you have completed half or more of the story. Doing it from the very beginning makes it too easy to get stuck or give up every two pages.
And there you have it. Just go over these steps, and keep repeating them in circles until you are done.
