: Re: Identifying and managing weak scenes during planning I structured my plot, designed the path to the climax, listed my characters and even outlined some scenes. Then halfway through I got stuck:

@Ann1701686

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You identified the weak link as character motivation. In the snowflake method you write the outline for every character, and that can help identify weak scenes. But I suspect you didn't understand the characters well enough when you hadn't written them. Which maybe points to doing a character study before you start writing. I've been looking for good advice on that myself. I've heard of interview methods and character sheets, but for me only writing out a few bad chapters as I explore who these people are works.

For you, it sounds like this is the next step. Figure out your characters early, then look at each scene as if you were writing the story about that character. If motivations are in tact and the scene is still interesting, then it may just be a personal motivation issue if you can't write to the plan. It's still not a problem to rewrite. The joy of an outline is that you rewrite early instead of late. So hopefully less hours in revision on a huge work, but it didn't remove the process; it moved it.

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