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Colouring in the map

TheokinsJ

Troubadour
It has been a long time since I last posted on the forum, and while I've been trying to make progress with my writing, I have fallen into the trap of 'colouring in the map'.
I love world-building, and as often as I can spare, I am always searching through old Norse poems, reading ancient history and other books, searching for names and inspiration for lore. I have drawn out a map, on a massive sheet of paper, and it is my weekly routine to go and look at it, and add more and more names and places.

Yet for all this, my writing has not come so easy. I wrote the first 60 pages of the novel, then decided to scrap it and start fresh. Yet since then I have slowly, sentence by sentence, written less than 5 pages in the space of a month. I love writing and I love world-building, yet somehow I need to find a way to get on with the story and stop distracting myself with the lore. Any thoughts?
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Just set aside some time everyday,week, what ever you think you can spare and go some place like the library/ coffee shop/ McDonalds and write. That's what I do. Regardless of if I write one word or thousands, I have to stay at the place for the allotted time. This gets me in the mindset of I'm there already I might as well get something done.

Part of it may also be fear of the unknown. It's easy to continue in a rut, doing familiar things. I don't know if this is your first novel or not, but if it is, it can seem like a huge mountain to climb, where you don't know what to do once you get beyond a safe height. That's the way it was with my first novel.

For the most part, to get on with it, the solution is simply to get on with it. Just start writing and don't stop until you're done. Do it or don't. There's nothing in the way but your self.
 

Lawfire

Sage
Maybe the story you're writing hasn't grabbed your attention yet? Are you sure it's the story you want to write?
 
Use the World building to inspire you, find a culture that you love, and write a story based on it!!!. You need to find your inner motivation, that passion, that love of the world, the characters ,the story, the passion that gets you up each morning, that makes you spend way to long in the shower thinking about various legends of obscure countries that aren't even prominent in the story. You need to get that passion that means the characters are sitting on your shoulders, constantly talking to you. You need to get the raw, burning desire to write that makes everything else fade into irrelevance. it doesn't matter, if your prose sucks, anything, get the passion, and it WILL make everything all right.
listen to music, walk in nature, just think about your world and the story, INSPIRE YOPURSELVE AND WRITE!!!!!!!!!!!
my Friend, Yes, you need to write every day, or as much as you can. I try to do at least 500 words a day, and usually suced, but this dosent matter, you need to FEEL the story, not write something that holds no passion for you. WRITE WHAT YOU want to write, then you will not feel forced, it will come as naturally as breathing.
I could go on FOREVER, but I wont :)
As you might have guessed, I have this passion, and I have just fired my self up- I feel like punching the wall, but instead I shall go and write my own tale.
HOPE THIS HELPS AND GOOD LUCK TO YOU SIR!!!! :D
 

Bruce McKnight

Troubadour
Sometimes when I get into a slow-writing funk, I jump ahead and start writing an exciting scene, even if it is out of order. Then I keep going, jumping from exciting scene to exciting scene, mostly dialogue with little description. Then, I go back and rearrange them in order and start filling in the blanks. This usually gives me enough momentum to go back in and add depth, description, and stage directions.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
@TheokinsJ: it doesn't sound from your description that you are doing much writing in the world-building. You're researching. Which, for myself, sometimes means I'm *avoiding* writing.

One method I use to control this lamentable tendency is to use TKs. TK is an old writing abbreviation to mean "some good name goes here". You can use any abbreviation you like. Just yesterday I needed to know what sort of compound I could use to cauterize a wound (I didn't want to use a hot iron). I knew one existed. Rather than look it up, I used TK and kept writing, telling myself I'd do that _faascinating_ research later.

Which I did. Once I'd written my quota I gave myself permissions to go squirreling across the Internet all I liked in pursuit of silver nitrate and its early uses and its alternate names and all the rest. Along the way I wound up at alchemy sites and saw any number of gruesome photographs. Good fun!

The third phase was to go in today and do a search on TK, plugging in the good info I'd retrieved yesterday.

I don't know if this will work for you, but it does for me. Being a historian by training, the temptation to squirrel can be very strong. I need this method to protect me from myself.

One tech addendum: I'll use a different abbreviation for each 'fill it in later'. Always two letters (because it's quick), and always in upper case. When I do the search, I search on upper-case only, which lets me avoid false positives.

hth!
 
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