Long lasting writers block

[MakenzMoon03]

Hi, I'm Mackenzie. When I was in 8th grade I started writing a book about werewolves aka in my mind hybrids. Last year around summer I stopped writing and still have not gotten very far since I stopped. I'm hoping to find some motivation to continue my wolf book and the others I have started and plan to write as well. I would like to be a writer. I hope I've come to the right place to remotivate my writing.

 

[MrNybble]

My processes of avoiding writers block is two things. Make a simple one page outline of your story plot, and/or work on more then one story at a time. An singular idea does not make a complete story and sometimes thinking about another story can spark ideas in another. That old Murphy's law of "As soon as you stop looking for something or find a replacement does that original thing finally show." Applies to story ideas as well. May not work for everybody.

 

[Asher the Red]

Hi Mackenzie
I keep my WIP going by reading. Anytime I feel blocked, I grab a book. Right now I'm into Stephen Blackmore's Eric Carter series, snarky necromancer and assorted enemies. If that doesn't do it, I get out the kindle. You might enjoy G.S. Dennings Warlock Holmes series, all kinds of beasts in that one.
If you haven't tried already, use the search engine here. You'll find all kinds of great ideas.
Don't give up, respond to some of the posts. Not everyone has a PhD, some of us are normal
Asher the Red out.

 

[Chasejxyz]

I started writing about your age, too, but what got in the way of me really writing and doing as much as I could was my own pre-conceived notions. If I couldn't figure out how to write a sentence perfectly, I was just stuck and nothing happened. I would think of all the books I've read and how good they were and how everything I made was hot garbage.

Think of it this way: you want to start getting into baking because you see all those gorgeous cakes on Instagram. You're going to make mistakes, you're gonna frost them when they're too hot and it'll melt, your hand slips decorating it, you get the ratios for food dye off so the colors for your Big Sports Game Cake don't look right. But you'd never think "I don't believe I can make a professional-tier cake, so I'm not even going to try" because you know you got to practice. You might get bored of cakes for a bit so you might move on to cookies or pies. But you're still working on your baking, on your decorating skills, those things will help you make nicer cakes down the line. You might even discover you're really passionate about making the perfect chocolate chip cookie. But you gotta try things out even if there's a decent chance it'll come out looking bad, you'll never learn otherwise.

What about writing makes you happy? Is it character interactions, is it crafting a new world, is it playing with old tropes in fresh ways? Write one-off scenes/chapters that have the things you like to do or want to try out and see how it feels. It's much better to spend a few thousand words to figure out you don't like writing in first person than to be half way through your book and realize that. It'll also help you discover your process. Some people need really structured outlines, some people feel suffocated by them. How everyone writes is different and you need to figure it out on your own. What really helped me with that was writing fanfiction, since I tried out so many new things. One was a story that ended up being ~40k words across multiple chapters, so I had to create an outline for it. I learned that I need to allocate myself space to do what feels right in the moment...and also that editing to make it all cohesive was important, too. I took all the things I learned and finally finished a draft of my book that I was happy with.

There are no rules in writing, there are no absolutes. But you need to experiment and let yourself write some not-great words to figure it out.

 

[LCatala]

Welcome to the forum. I hope you can find your motivation to write back. One advice I heard in those situation is to try to remember what you liked about the original idea, what made you decide to write it in the first place.

 

[MakenzMoon03]

Welcome to the forum. I hope you can find your motivation to write back. One advice I heard in those situation is to try to remember what you liked about the original idea, what made you decide to write it in the first place.

I started writing because I write to relieve my urge of making my fantasy reality.