Can I get a mentor here?

writers magic i like to help if i can

 

never published a book but writing one

 

for me i create the characters first then that is me pm writer's magic we can talk i find it helpful to talk about things to push things along

 

No one can help you develop a plot or characters or setting out of whole cloth. If they did, it wouldn't really be your story, would it?

I agree that logline is not helping you. You need to set it aside and start asking yourself some practical questions. Where precisely in America is she from? How far in the future? What's different in her world? Why do the Norse (I assume you mean Norse?) gods want her dead? What did she do? How does she travel while running away? What is the deal with these gods? Where do they live? What do they spend their time doing? Do they have powers? What kind? How are they going to make things difficult for her? What is her goal/destination? How will she change over the course of the story? Just keep asking and thinking about it until you come up with something that sounds good and write it down. Keep writing things down until they can be vaguely shaped into an outline. Go over your outline looking for holes or things you can make better. Start writing ASAP.

 

I think you may be stressing yourself out a bit with preconception of supposed progress. You've been asking a whole heap of questions the last week or two, which is great. You've received alot of replies in your threads because your questions are questions that many aspiring authors have to ask every now and then one way or another. So far so good yea?

You need to separate your two desires. On the one hand, you want help bringing an initial-thought-level idea to paper. On the other, you want help learning basic concepts of writing that you've come across quite recently. I'm gonna tell you right now that you won't learn all you want about both of these issues at the same time, while also producing a masterpiece of literature. I think you need smaller steps, like the rest of us

It's easy for very new writer's to be madly devoted to their first idea, and that devotion will do you alot of harm if unchecked. It will prevent you from experimenting outside of that idea, which prevents you from learning more broadly about how to write.

My first suggestion to you, which won't require tremendous changes on your behalf, is to come up with a scene or an encounter. You don't need to know what's going to happen in it, but that doesn't matter. Force yourself to do this one exercise. Write the scene anywhere from say 1 to 10 paragraphs in length, and see what you came up with. Don't like it? Rewrite it. Repeat, until you have something that you feel is a minor achievement.

Here comes the fun part. Dissect what you just wrote. If you're interested in learning how to show more and tell less, look at how you've written your things, and study your text alongside resources on the technique you find online. You'll find a bunch of ways you can change your text already. You want to learn how to present intrigue better? Study about it, and compare your text to others' examples on intrigue. You'll find things to change in your text. Repeat this, and play around with your text alongside techniques you find interesting to learn.

Remember that techniques are suggestions and guidelines. They're not rules. You don't become a level 2 writer once you unlock the secrets of show/tell, and you won't be a lvl 4 writer if you blindly follow the hero's journey setup.

Improvise, adapt, revise, rewrite, kill and revive your written text as much as you want. In the end, your text will read completely differently to what it read like when you first started, and you'll have learned at least something Read, write, rewrite, reread. This is how you learn and improve. Will take closer to 50 years than 50 days to feel like you master writing, if even 50 years would be enough.

 

There are a few things I want to recommend that have been helpful for me lately, and at large.

Firstly, I recommend considering finding accountability, critique, feedback and writing partners. Either through the various online platforms available like this one or through finding a physical writing group, each has its pro’s and cons, personalities, and things that they can offer. I think as long as there is reciprocal energy exchanges and you are willing to do the best you can to help each other you become each other’s teachers, mentors and students anyway. Write, and share. Make sure you have something to bring to the table even if its one sentence.

I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with the idea of a mentor, but what I have found in myself, in my friends and in writing circles over the years is what we need more than a mentor is to be surrounded by supportive people, and a few trusted ones we can share our writing with to get that feedback, to challenge and to support us on the journey. There are plenty of ways you can do this too by doing challenges short term or long term, commenting on other peoples work, and long term challenges like Camp/Nanowrimo [National Novel Writing Month] or create your own.

More on the craft and characters aspect…

I could give you a list of resources pages long – One though that has helped me come back to the basics of craft and storytelling in a new way has been Lisa Cron’s work. I believe she has classes out there on the site Lynda and she has a few books one which is called Story Genius. I have found her perspective and way at looking at story as a whole to be a pivotal change in the direction of how I view the craft and stories, and her discussion on story and what it is are inspiring.

On the subject of writing inner conflict, I highly recommend checking out Breathing Life into your characters by Rachel Ballon or search for psychology in writing fiction. Looking deeply at the inner wounds, background story and life goals of a character lays the foundations, what really hooks you into a story is being able to step inside their inner landscape and ask questions, probe, explore, create conflict and I think by connecting with aspects of psychology this helps. Breathing life in your characters is a great book that offers exercises for focusing on the inner to create the external and vice versa.

One simple and free suggestion could be to look at personality types. Like Myers Briggs you can get a great idea about some of the inner, personalities of characters and find one that you feel works for your character. They also get you thinking about how other characters would interact with your main character and the kinds of worlds your character could inhabit living with that personality type.

Take one of those personality types, and write about your character using them for 15 minutes, then write another scene for 20, and so on. Build on that. Explore the different elements. I know it is a simple technique or tool. But it has been one that has helped me with defining characters in small casts, as well as large and it gets me deeper into knowing my character and learning about writing at the same time. I learn what I like, and how I respond to characters and stories.

In terms of what you want to write, that’s fantastic. I started writing SF a few years ago after I never thought I would, or could, and I sat down and I wrote, and I failed at it a lot, and I have two finished manuscripts and reading over it is sometimes painful because a lot of it is shit, but the learning experience, the challenge, the friendships, the soundtracks [make yourself a good soundtrack] and just writing to learn about the genre or the story itself... that keeps me coming back to the world, it is worth it.

And we are all in the same place every day we wake up. We are always starting again, learning again, growing and making mistakes and sometimes even people who have been at this for years need to be reminded of that, the heart of it though is…

WHY DO YOU WANT TO WRITE – WHY THIS STORY – WHY THIS GENRE – WHY NOW?

Write down the answers to these questions and you’ve already begun…

 

To share some of my personal experience with writing with you OP:

I have an idea that I love, that I want to have as my first finished novel/novella. I've had this idea since before I joined these forums. I have a written a grand total of almost 1,000 words on that project, during all these years.

1,000 words in a couple of years. That's how devastating that idea has been to me.

On the flip side, I learned to put that idea aside, for quite some time, and focus on reading and writing. Writing things for the sake of learning how to write, instead of writing the book I wanted to write. I have 1,000 words on my beloved manuscript, but I have nearly 250,000 words, and counting, on exercises and random scripts that I never intend to publish. Learn to let go, temporarily, of what you think you wanna write. Just write other things for now.