I am currently writing a novel and am finding myself very lost. Sound familiar? I've written about 120 pages just for the first act! I'm well into the second act. I've got the third act mapped out. But I'm still losing steam as I become confused by all the plot twists and characters. So what am I doing? Writing my ending first. Sounds counter-intuitive, right? But it's not. See, if you know what is going to happen at the end of your story, then this helps you fill in all the blanks as to what should lead up to this.
Of course, I don't quite have as much "inspiration" as I did for the first act, when everything was new. I am worrying about whether the story is good enough, if the ending is weird (read: jarring). So instead of letting fear and writer's block bog me down, I doing something I did last night in the writer's group I attend: I am concentrating on writing just the setting, really fleshing out what the scenes look and feel like where my main character will be experiencing the last tense moments of her story.
So what did we learn here: If you get stuck, concentrate on writing your ending. And if you have trouble doing that, don't become stuck in the dynamics of the characters or even how the chapter should begin. (I for one know that I always want my chapters to begin with a bang!) Just write concentrate on setting, the description of what it looks and feels like in that/those scenes.
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