Hello, all. Quite an interesting, not to say provocative, thread. I’m afraid I have no chance of holding my own with that part of the conversation, so I’ll just get on with my assignment and try to explain (at least to myself) how I put a story together.

Ideas for stories come out of the blue. I have no idea from what dark crevice of my mind they appear. Once I have an idea, I start writing. I put the idea down on paper, and any character info I can think of.

I don’t use an outline because I never know where my story is going to go. I do use character sheets, but only after I’ve been working with a character for a while. My characters tend to quickly develop their own “voice,” and that allows me to “ask” them about themselves. I am not clinically schizophrenic, I promise, but after I’ve been working with characters for a while, they just start talking to me. I write down what they say, and, voila! I have a story.

This is not always good. Often, they take me places I hadn’t planned on going, did not want to go, and have no idea how the hell I am going to get out of there. Sometimes a solution eventually occurs to me. When that happens, I produce some of my best stories. When it doesn’t, the manuscript sits on the shelf, often for months, until I decide to take another stab at it.

Although I’ve been a technical and business writer for years, I have no formal training in how to write a story, a novel, etc. In fact, some of the terminology I’ve run into on this forum is unfamiliar to me. I just put ideas on paper, make sure the spelling and grammar appear to be correct, read it aloud once, and hope for the best. I am terrible at editing my own work, because I fall in love with my own writing. * Sigh *

While I don’t use an outline, ideas for bits and pieces of the story tend to come to me at odd times, including 2am, so I keep my laptop with me everywhere I go (it’s on the bedside table at night). When an idea or a scene leaps to mind, I just scroll to a new page and start typing. When the rest of the action gets me to that point, I revise as necessary, but those scenes that come to me in toto, and out of the blue, tend to be pretty good and need little revision.

I’m usually at the halfway point of a story before I know what the crisis is going to be, or how it will end. So, that is my willy-nilly way of putting a story together.

Tips and things I’ve learned:

1) Draw from your own experience. It sounds more believable that way.

2) In general, draw characters and surroundings lightly; it allows the reader to “buy-in” to your story by making the hero(ine) and locale into whatever they feel comfortable with.

3) If you don’t like it, don’t write it.

4) This one isn’t a tip so much as something I’ve learned, plus a query. I find writing the crisis part of a story to be very difficult. I always fall in love with my protagonists, and usually hate my antagonists. So when I do awful things to my heros, it hurts. My brain also usually wends its way through some VERY dark corridors as I imagine what is happening. The stuff that ends up on the page is usually much milder than the creepy and icky stuff that slimed up my mind while I was working on it.

My query is this: do other authors have a difficult time writing these hard bits? And, if so, do they have any tips on how to deal with it?

Well, that's my two cents...

Lady C