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Part 1 - Now, what has worked for me? So far so good...

Realizing and coming to terms with it, that I am a pantser or in other words discovery writer...

I have tried and tried to plan my stories but every time I do that I lose the ability to write the story, I get stuck, I just can't seem to write anything. I know what is suppose to happen and I know what the characters need to do but I just can not write it.

This has frustrated me to no end... most articles/posts/discussion I find concerning writing process, is about the best way to plan your story and I figured 'I have to do that, to be able to write' but that has not worked well for me. Realizing I am not a Plotter, but what do I do then... I have been trying to find that out and it has taken some time for me to find my way.

I have taken all my writing projects, that I have planned and hit pause on those. I took the only story, I actually had, not planned yet, I had an rough idea of the few characters I wanted to have in the story and a magic system, that I was still working out how worked and an idea of the ending.

That became my story, the one I was going to write.

I took the characters and wrote a few lines about them, finding the voice they had. Gave the magic system some thought so I could actually use it and how it could be part of the story. Wrote down a few lines, of the rough idea, of how the story would end and what I wanted the characters to learn about themselves. Depending on what it was I wrote somewhere between 100-500 words on each subject.

And then I began to write.

Chapter 1, I wrote and wrote and when I had made my first draft of the chapter I realized it was actually chapter 2 not 1. But another thing happened as I wrote, a guard that was supposed to die and was not really a person I had given much thought, came to life as I wrote and I began to see how he could be part of the story and how him being part of the story would actually change the path of some of the other characters. This new character would change how the romance of two other characters would end and how the bittersweet ending I had in mind would become even more bittersweet. Like the other characters I wrote few lines of text about him, a little backstory and his voice. Then I started a new chapter 1, again, and this time the words just come to me, as I now, had these two characters that interact with each other in a way I had not considered before.

This is a process and I am still finding my way through it...

To be continued... when more happens... and I have more to tell...

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Gribba
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