How do you start a story — or get a story back on track? If you’re feeling lost or blocked, try templating to get your plot on course.
Here’s what to do: bullet point your initiating incident, your rising action, your crisis, and your resolution for both your main plot and subplots. Make a table to see events running parallel, remembering subplots exist to enhance, complicate – ultimately, compliment – your main action. Listing like this highlights any irrelevancies, keeping your tale on track, and makes all you write intertwined and significant to your protagonist’s journey. Plan out using this framework as your reference.
Our subconscious minds combine items in unexpected, sometimes whimsical ways. Set a timer for twenty minutes and use at least three of these words in your draft. Write without stopping: a red scarf, windshield wiper, …
Select a scene that involves 2-3 characters. Write a paragraph from the point of one character. Now write the same interaction from another character’s point of view. For example: your paragraph could involve the point …
Choose a random occupation, a random personality trait, and the trait's opposite. Now, outline a train of events that explains how a person of your chosen occupation changes from having the random trait to having …
Choose a character and think of ways they’d react to things that happened during your (the writer’s) day. Use your experiences, think how you reacted, and then how your character would have reacted. Possible events: …
If you're struggling with one of you characters, try writing a letter as your current character to their older or younger self. Think of what they might want to tell their past or future self, …
If you're feeling stuck or intimidated about how to start writing, take five minutes before you jump into your writing project to pen a love letter (or hate letter) to the blank page in front …
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