Writing Slumps- Cause and Effect

Hey guys!  A while back I posted and said I was going to try an experiment… Right around Christmas too.  Well, you only learn from experience, right?  Well, turns out, posting right around the holiday season is not very easy, so here I come, a couple weeks late.  Oops!  Well, as per promise, I tried to think about my WiP as much as I could over the holidays.  Actually, though, I didn't think about it until after New Years, at which point I was beginning to really feel behind, and guilty for being so, so I began to analyze why I was avoiding it.
So, I've been writing 500 words every day as a challenge from the Write Chain (Look it up, it's super cool!), and as I wrote every day, I was painfully aware that every morning I woke up and planned to work on my WiP, and every night I had put it off till nine at night and ended up typing 500 words on some random project on my phone as I lay in bed, all the lights out, bedtime being postponed by my 500 words.  Now, the other day, I was sitting on the couch watching an interview on Youtube with a ballerina, something I stopped doing a while back because I began to want to be a ballerina (trust me, I am no ballet dancer), and I knew in my heart of hearts, I wanted to be a writer.  So this time, watching this interview, I, once again, began to want to be a ballet dancer.  Then I got angry with myself.  I couldn't even write the book I had wanted to for half a year, and now I was pining after something I really didn't want to do.  So, I figured, if a ballet dancer had made me want to be one of her kind, then I could find writers and bloggers who inspired me to be who I was meant to be.  I looked at articles, took notes, and I unintentionally began to revise my book to be better as I went along.  This is where my conclusion comes in.
I have realized, in these last two weeks, that my book was too underdeveloped to be in production just yet.  I realized that two characters serve no purpose (so they're going to be extracted and put into a folder, because I want to use them later), I was telling too much, instead of showing, that if I switched from my 3 person PoV to a single Main Character, I could add a lot more interest and the characters would have more reason for conversation, that some creatures I had created were ludicrous, that my settings were too vague, the theme was not very strong at all, it wasn't serving the purpose I wanted it to, and I needed a better, stronger plot.  This thing was as broken as Jamie in the Bionic Woman.  I needed to make it stronger, faster, and better.  The 6 million dollar novel.  (Sorry for the lapse into 80s culture, I'm all better now, I promise).
  That was why I couldn't bring myself to write it, I had no direction, and I knew that it wasn't living up to it's full potential.  Honestly, I hadn't believed that my novel would undergo the drastic change so many authors had said that their novels had done.  Silly me!  Now it's back in the preproduction stage, missing two characters who I fired and the plot is under reconstruction.

How about you?  Have you done a novel overhaul?  Are you planning on it?  Any tips of your own for writing slumps?  Let me know in the comments!

Viola June HFA-DGN

On the Fifth Day of NaNo Prep my Novel Gave to Me...

Hey guys!  Sorry about the wait on this post, I had some stuff come up last week that required me to put some things off for a bit.  On the fifth of October, the NaNoWriMo website was all fixed up and prepared for our event of the season, NaNoWriMo 2015!  So it's up and running and ready for you to put your novel up!  Make sure you head over and do that.
Okay, now down to business.
On the Fifth Day of NaNo Prep my Novel Gave to Me… A general plot (part 3).  Here we are at the last stretch of this whole general plot thing.  The middle.  This is the part that I feel like is the most challenging, because this has to be exciting enough to keep the readers reading.  The middle is actually my favorite part of reading a good book, because by now, you should love it, and there's still an entire half of it to go!  I was reading the Fellowship of the Ring the other day and right about in the middle I was at the peak of my excitement.  I loved the book, and there was still a long way to go before it ended.
So how does one get a phenomenal middle?  Well, the midpoint is as middle as you can get, and this is where the excitement gets amped because of an event that happened.  For example, in the Incredibles (Pixar, Disney) the audience's interest level is dwindling, right before Bob's wife presses a homing beacon and Bob gets captured by the enemy.  Woo! That dwindling interest level is certainly not dwindling anymore.  Or at least, something like that.  So think of it as the second of your three plot points.  They all need to be just as interesting and exciting, so they're all equal.  Number one is the beginning, this is number two, and number three is the ending.
Number one in my book is the character enlists in WW1
Number two is his best friend deserts him
Number three is he lives happily ever after (or will he?)
So now that we have the three main plot points, we can fill it in with smaller events that we want to happen.  My recommendation for this is to write each event on a separate index card (I cut my index cards in threes so I don't use up more than is necessary), or a sticky note, then use tape that you can take on and off (I use artists' tape) or a tack and tack it to a cork board, or tape it to a piece of paper.  The reason for all this is so you can rearrange things as you see fit.

So how is your guys' NaNo plotting coming along?  Have you got a middle?  What's your favorite part of a book?  Let me know in the comments!

Viola June, HFA-DGN

On the Fourth Day of NaNo Prep my Novel Gave to Me...

Hey everyone!  We have reached the fourth day of NaNo prep.  Let's get right in.
On the fourth day of NaNo prep my novel gave to me… A general plot (Part two).  Well this is way more exciting than yesterday, right?  *crickets*.  Yeah, that's what I thought.  In part two of my general plotting I go to my ending, skipping the middle because normally the middle is the hardest to figure out (for me).
The ending is critical, because the readers have to leave feeling satisfied, unless it's a series, then you should probably dish out dissatisfaction, but that's another subject for another time.  Sometimes you'll know your ending down to the very lines the characters speak, or sometimes it'll be simply a blur that gives you a rough idea of where you're headed.  For my current WIP I have it down to the line, but for my NaNo work, it's all a blur, so it really could go both ways.
What does your ending need?  How about a resolution?  Series or not, this is very important.  My current WIP is book one in a five book series.  Even though I plan on leaving a cliffhanger of sorts, I still have to give the readers something to hold on to, because I want to keep my readers.  So I'll end with leaving the characters in uncertainty, with a degree of certainty.  The readers will know where the characters are headed at that moment, but it'll almost be a frying pan into the fire situation, so even though the readers will know where the characters are going, they'll have absolutely no clue how the characters will get out of it.  For a one book show, the readers need to feel like the character is secure, wherever they're headed.  There can't be any "how will they get out of it this time?" because then it calls for another explanation, which isn't a resolution.
For my NaNo novel, the blur for the ending I have is the character learns their lesson, and lives semi-happily ever after.  The beginning is the character is involved in the new war, World War 1, or, the Great War.

How about you?  Have you figured out your ending?  Do you have a blur, or do you have it pinned down to the line?  Let me know in the comments!

Viola June HFA-DGN