Fifty Pages or Bust: Never Give Up!

For most of my writing career, I have been called the “Fifty-page Wonder” by my critique group because I could come up with a story idea, flesh out the main two or three characters, and pull fifty pages out of my hat with relative ease.

I won dozens of writing contests back when the romance genre had lots of contests, and even was nominated twice for in the Golden Heart contests. But, all too often, I lost steam and the fifty pages went under the bed, gathering dust bunnies.

Why? I didn’t know what was going to happen next or after that or after that. My characters laughed at me when I asked what they wanted or needed or were willing to work for, and I struggled to make those stories come together into a cohesive, believable, and likable tale.

I finally had to learn to edit books to figure it out.

What did I learn?

1. Create a goal, motivation, and conflict for my characters, whether they liked it or not. Each “important” character needs one of each to really come alive. All too often, if you don’t know what they want, you can’t create a place to go. So, as part of that, you also have to…(see next line)
2. Know how the book is going to end. Since your protagonist has a goal, a realistic ending where the original goal (or the new and improved one discovered along the way) comes true. Do you know where the characters will end up? If so, it’s mostly about putting plausible obstacles in the way.
3. Set up a structure, knowing that stories have certain places where certain things happen. The Hero’s Journey is, of course, the industry standard but isn’t set in concrete. Many writers, especially if they’re also strong readers, follow the HJ automatically. We know that there has to be an Ordinary World that needs an Inciting Incident to get the story started. Then, we need our characters to jump from the Ordinary World into the Extraordinary World to learn the lessons. The largest and most important lesson, of course, is midway through: the Reversal – although it goes by many names. The second half of the book is the unraveling and putting back together of the character’s character as the new understanding helps them find the real goal, Last, but certainly not least, is the buildup to the end. It has many aspects: the hero/ine finding a path to reach the goal, a black moment where it seems unobtainable, a sacrifice when a choice MUST be made, conflict over that choice, finding the answer from within, and, finally, the execution of the plan. It all sounds simple when I write it. And, ultimately, it is, once we know how to do it.

Bottom line, give yourself a break. I’ve pulled more than one of those stories out from under the bed and finished it years later. It’s like I needed to let them percolate under there with those dust bunnies until they were finally ready to finish. And, until I knew how to make that happen.