I’ve been dying to get going on my fanfiction again, because God knows, I feel like I’ve had it on hold forever. Writer’s block is pure evil! Before I wrote my Didact story called “The Good, the Bad, and the Didact” I had several stories on hold, including my Megadeth saga which was my most read so far. But I had no clue where to continue the story to when I was in the middle of the sequel.
Then it died down and was on hold for months, along with a single KISS fantasy story. I ended up deleting those stories because I figured I would never finish them. So how on Earth did I manage to stay on top of my Didact fanfiction, but not the rest of my work? One thing that I think I have learned, is that distractions pop up. It doesn’t matter what they are; such as having more than one tab open. As I worked on The Good, the Bad and the Didact, I tried to do one chapter a week and had nothing else open on my browser. At that time, I was really absorbed in the story.
I would often remind myself, “work on this Didact story! It’s going really good so far.” and as I did that, my writing at it got better and better. Maybe if I don’t remind myself to work on these things, I lose interest in updating them, and lack enjoyment of updating them when I finally sit down to do it.
Writing stories, sometimes you have to just go with it, don’t plan ahead what you’re going to write, then when you finish a chapter, that’s when you go back and make changes the way you want them to. I don’t usually bother too much with doing that on here, unless I make a spelling or grammatical error, but writing stories is completely different.
The other issue was that when I planned a sequel, I had a lot of things thrown together. I had a hard time introducing the conflict of the story, and the plot in general. There was the idea that the Covenant Remnant extracted the Forerunner shrine containing the Librarian’s imprint, and they brought it to Nomdagro where the Didact and I were trying to settle in to our life together. To make things even more complicated, I decided that humanity would follow the Covenant to Nomdagro and they have revived the conscience of the Lord of Admirals from 343 Guilty Spark’s wreckage, only this time his conscience was in a human body.
Maybe I made the plot too complex, that’s another thing that prevents me from pursuing things. I mean, the original Didact story I wrote had a basic plot that I never planned much. I surprisingly never added the mutation part where my character becomes the third Didact. But maybe since that is a whole different story, I could still implement it into a sequel, but it would have to be introduced differently.
There’s no point rewriting TGTBATD to add in the mutation because it was a success, and I’m happy with it the way it is. I also made the plot pretty complex in the Megadeth sequel to Super Collider as well, so that could be also why I gave up on that. Maybe the more complex the plot is, the harder it is to work on the story.
It’s easier for some professional authors but for me, I guess not. My Ghost fanfiction had barely started, but I stopped that as well when I realized my character’s treatment from her guardian was the same as mine in TGTBATD! I can’t seem to come up with anything different these days.
So to speak, I’m trying to overcome my writer’s block, but if I really want to write let’s say……..a sequel to TGTBATD I might have to come up with something more simple of a plot. The only thing I have set to occur no matter what, is a romantic scene that occurs during one of those “calm before the storm” moments.
Maybe a Star Wars story too, but it’s not easy to prevent distractions, as there can be so many of them on the Internet these days, I have to learn to just go with the flow with my writing, make changes afterwards to what I’m thinking about adding rather than plan them, and not make such big fat plots like Michael Bay.
It isn’t easy but trust me, I really want to get back in to writing stories. Back before I even started using the Internet for anything, all I did was write. I used my dad’s old laptop when I was 12 or 14 to write a bunch of stories until I got my own laptop when I was 16. Things aren’t the same anymore, but I have to pick up the pieces of this skill of mine.
-Emily
Monsterlady's Diary 