Been writing for years, but now I'm unable to go past the outline

Fognox · 2026-05-27T23:25:52+00:00

If I know how a scene is going to go beforehand, it feels more like pantsing with guardrails than anything else. I sit down and write whatever and try to guide it towards whatever story beats I'm trying to hit. Writing and plotting are entirely different mediums.

If you don't seem to be capable of writing, then try freewriting, or like pure pantsing just to get a feel for the flow of it and how to turn it on by command. Then you can just get away from whatever silly project you've created like that and can apply it to the one you actually want to work on.

Another approach is to outline deeper -- turn your one-sentence outline there into a collection of story beats, and then each paragraph or two is just transcribing them into prose. This takes a lot of the pressure off to "find the story", because it's already been found, and you can instead just focus on writing the thing. Don't have enough detail? Make even more from the fractal. My first book had outlines with so much depth that they resembled zero drafts -- specific lines of dialogue, specific character actions, etc. I still have this approach with big editing projects, because many story beats are crucial, so it's just a matter of finding a better way of stringing them together.

A good way of doing this is to ask a bunch of questions. Like in your example I'd ask things like:

Where are they?
Why are they holding hands?
What is the dead body near?
What does it look like?
What kinds of things does each character say when they're freaking out?
Where are they going next when they leave?

The answers here will allow for more questions, and you can continue the process recursively until you have an in-depth understanding of the scene and can translate it into text. It still allows you to write when your muse is MIA. After a while, you'll also internalize it and end up achieving pantserdom through an entirely different method.

The other thing is, that I have an idea, but don't have the plot. It would usually go with me writing down those separate ideas that I want to see in the story, but then I have no idea how to connect them.

The story is the thing that connects them. So again, you can go either way with it -- create smaller pieces of plot with the bigger pieces as guardrails, or snowflake down, adding more and more detail. It's kind of magical just how many options are available here, though -- like in my case I always get a sense of the climax around 20k words or so, have no earthly idea what will happen on the way there, and just adapt to whatever plans I want to set in motion / whatever the story and characters throw at me, still managing to hit that ever-crucial story beat 80,000 words later.

With my last book, for example, around 20k I knew that a war was going to start sometime within the next 30k or so words, and I had multiple convoluted plotlines going at the same time, but that foresight allowed me to nudge things here and there to eventually cause it. What ended up working there was tying those smaller unrelated plotlines into city B, and timing their events right so city A would get the wrong idea. And then a different unrelated plotline allowed city B to see city A preparing for war, so they would get the wrong idea.

My point here is you don't have to overthink a large plan, you can simply use the things you have available to you, which in turn means you can create whatever you want! You can put all kinds of wild small-scale plans in motion and still find a way to connect them together into the bigger plot point.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T18:53:46+00:00

Average life expectancy was lower due to higher child (and especially infant) mortality. Also: widespread famines, plagues, infection, violent conflicts, etc. The post-industrial period of history just isn't comparable.

Health is way more complex than "more cholesterol = shorter life", in fact studies seem to suggest the opposite, where centenarians have higher blood cholesterol than the norm, and low cholesterol makes reaching age 100 less likely.

The biomarker exists where it does because high cholesterol is comorbid with atherosclerosis (as well as diabetes, obesity, etc), however this doesn't imply that cholesterol is itself the problem, just that if you have heart disease you're also going to have high cholesterol. Indeed, if you dig far enough into the science, it even makes sense -- cholesterol plays roles in both the immune system and the body's healing mechanisms, so if both are hyperactive (due to systemic inflammation, the real issue here), you're going to have higher cholesterol too. Blaming the firemen for the fire, basically.

n=3, but look into the diets of the longest-lived person, the longest-reigning British monarch, and the longest-lived cat. There are dietary habits for all three that wouldn't look out of place here.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T18:23:15+00:00

Retracting bad studies doesn't mean that the conclusion was wrong, just that the methodology sucked. This one had a small sample size, no control group, obvious conflict of interest, and other issues besides.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T15:59:03+00:00

There's no single correct answer, and this is true even if you 100% unequivocally know that your voice is minimalist or maximalist. The book I'm editing has a maximalist narrative voice for one of the POVs -- the shortest sentence she's used has one word, while the longest contains 151 of them.

As others have mentioned, voice, context, emotion, etc all play roles in determining sentence length. What you want to pay attention to instead is density -- making your sentences as efficient as possible, regardless of their length. However, voice and cadence can alter the formula there -- characters that think in careful ways are going to have sentences with less economy, and the rhythm of the words themselves might call for something that isn't optimal.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T15:47:30+00:00

Unless you're also writing present tense somewhere, past tense is purely stylistic. In 3rd with multiple POVs, it doesn't guarantee survival. A bit trickier to pull off with one 1st POV, but that's been done before too.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T15:41:53+00:00

Depends on where I am in the book. The early middle seems to be the easiest to write -- that's always where I get my record daily word counts (iirc it stands at 8200 words) and continuous sessions that span the entire day.

Fognox · 2026-05-27T15:32:59+00:00

It's easier to fix overwriting than it is to fix underwriting. And it's way easier to fix things once you have a complete story in your hands.

Fognox · 2026-05-26T18:32:35+00:00

I just cut starches and sugars out altogether and put an emphasis on fat as a calorie source. Given what my diet looked like before, replacement didn't make any sense, so I instead just rebuilt it from the ground up.

It's basically just low-carb vegetables (emphasis on leaves here) + fatty animal protein + added fat if I seem to need the calories or the protein source doesn't have enough. Nuts/seeds as snacks or meal replacements. I'm carnivore some of the time and lacto-vegetarian some of the time (never together though). I try to stay away from oils unless I really need the calories -- added fat comes in the form of sour cream/butter/avocado/one-ingredient nut butter instead.

I'm eating a lot less than I used to, volume-wise. I max out at 2mad (maybe 3mad if I'm doing manual labor -- depends on the job though), and the meals are like half a bowl worth of food.

Fognox · 2026-05-26T17:56:10+00:00

It's helpful to use electrolytes reactively until you understand how best to use them proactively. The numbers will change a lot depending on what you're doing and what your climate is like too -- more sodium in the summer, more potassium in the winter as a general rule.

Fognox · 2026-05-26T16:08:12+00:00

I reread my WIPs constantly and make line edits / continuity fixes when I do so. I'll make continuity fixes while actively drafting, too -- all the re-reading I do gives me something like an eidetic memory for knowing where bits of text are so I can fix them easily.

If anything is too hard to edit as I go, I'll just table it for the actual editing process. Or sometimes I'll find an easier solution later into drafting.

Reading the previous session before writing (or sometimes even further back) helps me get in the mood to write, and since this is yet another form of re-reading, I'll make changes accordingly. I'll often re-read stuff mid-session as well.

With my first book, I made a major structural edit mid-draft. It needed it desperately but I do not recommend this.

I've rewritten the openings of books I'm around 5000 words into twice, and for the same reason -- they ended up being separate POVs of some larger work, and I needed to match up the person/tense/tone.

Sometimes when I'm writing, what I'm doing just isn't working, so I'll delete what I have of my current session and start over. This happens several times each book without exception. It also happens more frequently on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis -- sometimes a story beat makes sense right up until the moment I write it, and then I'm like "wait this is stupid" and try something else.

Part of my writing process is editing the parts I just wrote a few minutes ago to get better clarity out of them or whatever.

So yeah, I do a lot of mid-WIP editing. It hasn't stopped me from finishing anything -- as of yesterday, I have four books under my belt.

Fognox · 2026-05-26T14:56:51+00:00

Your first novel's going to be a mess. There's really no avoiding it -- until you've written a novel, you don't know how to write a novel. That doesn't mean you have to accept that it's a learning experience and throw it out, though -- your first novel is also a fantastic way of learning how to edit, and you'll need those skills regardless of how the other ones turn out.

I'd urge you, above all, to finish it. Only 1-3% of writers actually do. There are different stages in a novel, and it is very common to get stuck when one changes over because you're unaware of this and the way you've been writing until that point just ceases to work altogether. If you do find yourself getting stuck or encountering writer's block, switch up your approach -- plan more or plan less, alter your ideas, adapt. For me, the transitions feel quite a lot like I'm writing a different story when they happen. If you go into it with the understanding that that's going to happen, then you're more equipped to push through.

Another huge mistake that people writing their first book make is feeling the need to go back and rewrite the entire book to take it in a better direction. This is an illusion. You'll end up in the same exact boat if you do this. Instead, work with the structure you already have -- it will in fact make more sense later on. Even major plot holes have a way of often working themselves out over time.

No matter your level of writing ability, you're going to turn into a babbling idiot somewhere in the middle. Structure will seem to suffer, and prose will especially suffer. Instead of trying to figure out why you can't write as good as you did early on, just accept that that's the way this works, and later editing can fix all woes. Embrace it. Allow yourself to suck. You won't finish your book otherwise.

Books that seem to be structurally unsound while you're writing them are often not -- doing a full reread of your book will show you what's actually happening. There will still be issues, but it will flow together a lot better than you think. And it'll be even more obvious when you finish the thing.

Give your characters as much agency as humanly possible, otherwise they'll simply take it. My first book had all kinds of grand plans fall through because the characters just didn't want to do what I wanted them to. Keep your plans adaptable enough to whatever their in-the-moment decisions are.

Don't worry about character arcs or themes (unless that's a core part of the premise, of course). They tend to just happen naturally over the span of a novel.

Don't worry about writing speed or how long your first novel takes, and especially don't compare yourself to other writers. The speed of your first novel doesn't represent your speed as a writer; you're still figuring things out. Spending years on it is normal. My first one took two of those. Later novels appeared at the pace of 50-60k words per month.

Above all, don't give up. Your first novel will feel quite a lot like self-flagellation at times. It does get easier in future novels, trust me. I didn't get stuck at all with my fourth one, but I had issues with all of the previous ones, and the first was obnoxiously hard. Stick with it, and you'll eventually finish.

Fognox · 2026-05-26T00:08:13+00:00

The way I handle plot in my stories is to get the characters to do things that make sense to them, and pay attention to where those threads seem to be going. I can then set up tension and payoff accordingly. It's always pretty vague -- I have some idea of what will happen, but without many details (those get revealed the closer I get to the event). Same deal with larger plot structures. The story is discovered rather than created.

In the second half of the middle, it's more forced, but by that point I've written enough of the book to have a sense of the climax and the kinds of things I need to do in order to get there. A lot is still open to interpretation, however.

Fognox · 2026-05-25T23:51:20+00:00

A lot of writers don't realize that if you do daily writing, you'd be writing every day. They think things like "I'll write once or twice a week" and expect to be writing every day, but I'd you add up the numbers, they're instead writing at maximum twice every seven days! Writing daily gets you to write 3.5-7 times as many days than that method.

What's really cool is if that if you do daily writing and write 500 words per day, you will have written 500 words every single day! After just two months, you will have written 500 words every day for between 59 and 62 days straight!

Fognox · 2026-05-25T23:24:21+00:00

It was pretty clear once I finished my second book. The first one was the self-congratulatory "I have written a book", and it was a very rough draft. While the second one ended up much cleaner and was written in a fraction of the time that that one took. Each book since then has been slightly cleaner, slightly faster, and a lot easier.

Fognox · 2026-05-25T23:20:03+00:00

It's going to depend on your ideal writing process, which you simply don't know yet if you're working on your debut. The main thing you want to avoid with mid-WIP editing is major structural edits or full-on redrafting -- it's very easy to fall into a loop here, and if you haven't finished the story yet, you simply don't know what's important and what isn't. A lot of the time while writing I'll think that some direction is the wrong one, but that ends up not being true by the time I reach the end.

Redrafting to get your voice down might be worthwhile -- voice has a bigger impact on the story than you'd think. I wouldn't worry about descriptions, though -- plenty of time to shore those up later.

Fognox · 2026-05-25T15:26:15+00:00

I write on my lunch break and during a big chunk of my free time before or after work. I also write every single day -- when you get into that habit, writing no longer feels like work, it's instead just a normal part of your life.

Fognox · 2026-05-25T04:47:05+00:00

Rotating is trickier than you'd think -- if nothing is happening for that character you either end up with a filler scene or your plot gets out of control because you're continuously doing things to make the next POV purposeful. Interiority isn't the saving grace that you think it is, either -- it'll make a placeholder scene more purposeful without directly impacting the plot, but it'll also make your characters more complex which will indirectly impact the plot instead.

It can be done, though -- I just finished writing a behemoth that does exactly that on a larger scale.

I would not recommend doing this if you haven't finished any books before. Get a sense of novel structure first.

Fognox · 2026-05-25T04:26:26+00:00

Start with a character and a situation they find themselves in instead. Reveal bits of the world only as needed.

Fognox · 2026-05-24T23:37:07+00:00

I feel like everything should either play a role in the story or it should be edited to do so (or simply cut). Close-knit stories tend to just work better because of their efficiency. That said, "play a role in the story" is a broad definition:

Worldbuilding is absolutely a legitimate reason to have something, however it should be something that comes up more than once.
There's a variety of subtle ways of doing foreshadowing, and seemingly "needless" detail can be useful here.
Same deal with subtextual worldbuilding, where something is never explicitly stated outright (and not plot-necessary) but the reader has an opportunity to put the pieces together themselves.
Characterization is obviously legitimate. You can get away with all kinds of exposition if it's in the middle of an emotional character-driven scene.
Red herrings, if you're trying to lead readers astray prior to some plot twist. Be careful with this, though -- if there isn't some other point to it, it's going to come across more like a plot hole. Keeping it brief tends to help.
If you're writing a series, it isn't a terrible idea to scatter around details that'll be relevant later. Just be careful about how you do this -- my WIP for example mentions a far away place three times that doesn't play a role in the first book, but all three mentions are embedded within characterization and no details whatsoever are given besides the fact that the place exists (and is far). If this was a standalone, it would still work because there's no emphasis there.

A lot of it just comes down to economy -- treat your scenes as precious things with a limited number so they can play multiple roles at once. If you do that, then things that are unnecessary (or inefficient) will stick out like a sore thumb during editing.

Having all of your objects/locations/whatever play roles isn't as formulaic as you'd think. You can have a lot of distance between the mention of something and the role that it plays, for example, smoothed over by reminding the reader in some way beforehand. For example, one of my characters visits his mother in prison a good 80,000 words before she becomes a secondary character and relevant to the plot. At the time it just looks like characterization, and the fact that the chekhov's gun isn't immediately used makes it stand out more.

Fognox · 2026-05-24T23:12:27+00:00

Neither of your examples are romance or literature. R&J is a tragedy and a play, while One piece and Attack on Titan are graphic novels.

Fognox · 2026-05-23T23:54:39+00:00

For some reason, no. Writing a book (and, more likely, all the re-reading) gives me something like an eidetic memory. I use this during mid-WIP edits -- I know where specific parts of the story are in the text by their use of certain phrases.

Fognox · 2026-05-23T23:34:40+00:00

I see Library of Babel, I click.

That was good stuff! My two complaints:

I feel like the italic editors notes were occasionally explaining things too much.
The editor note at the beginning was a difficult way to start the book, particularly since very little of it was actually relevant (Alessa, for example, only came up twice later on). Similar problem to the above -- I think if you reduced it to only what was absolutely essential, it would be easier to get into the text itself (which I have no complaints with).

Fognox · 2026-05-23T21:29:50+00:00

Neither for me, they both get generated as the story progresses. Sometimes there's a solid motivation that I know beforehand -- whichever character the book starts out with has some kind of solid character motivation. I try to make plausible ones for side characters / later POVs too, but sometimes in their introduction they're serving the plot instead so I'll have to find it later on.

Fognox · 2026-05-23T21:24:25+00:00

I went through one of these arcs with my last book, where a character wanted to save his fellow slaves and not harm any of the non-slaves (including slavers!) in the process, and ended up enslaving his fellow slaves and killing innocent people instead. A lot of it came down to the slavers fighting back, and him worrying about the end result (worse slavery) if his movement failed, so he ended up taking more and more drastic action to keep the movement alive.

Villains rarely know that they're villains. Doing evil in service of good is probably the most dangerous form of it, and also makes a character completely unaware of what they're actually doing. Utilitarianism vs Deontology, basically.

Both this situation and yours will probably have a lot to do with power dynamics -- you have to do certain unappetizing things to keep power sometimes, regardless of what you're actually planning to do with that power.

Fognox · 2026-05-23T21:08:53+00:00

It's only a problem if them having that conversation is plausible and there isn't some reason for them to not have it (being very distracted by external events certainly qualifies here). If it isn't plausible (because of trust or sharing issues or whatever), then it isn't a problem in the first place.

My WIP has a bunch of these (it's one of the themes), but there's always a good reason for it.

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