: Re: Picking a theme as a discovery writer When I write I often don't have any great meaningful moral to share. I don't have a message that I want to convey to the reader. I often don't write

@Holmes449

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I am a discovery writer; I don't usually look for a "theme", and my readers don't seem to miss it. There can be a problem with a story seeming to stall, and I don't know that there is an easy fix in identifying WHY it stalled.

As I have written in previous responses; I have minimized the occurrence of this by keeping the end-point of the story fixed in my mind; basically this is the climax of the plot and the solution to the MC's "big problem" that caused them to leave (metaphorically or literally) their "normal world" in ACT I, about 25% of the way through the story.

My end-point is vague, but not too vague to get to. So "She kills the man that killed her brother" is a little too vague; I'd need a little more detail than that, but I don't write out the end-scene, I just keep perhaps a quarter page of notes on how the end is brought about. Like what key piece of information she had to find that let her know who the real bad guy is, what mistake the bad guy made, or something like that. You might call it the KEY to the ending.

If I find I am writing a scene that will invalidate my ending, my rule is I have to come up with a new ending at least as good, or undo the scene. Usually I can tell I am shooting myself in the foot within a scene, but whenever I realize I have shot myself in the foot, I have to come up with the new ending, or delete or revise back to where my key was valid.

I think of the ending as a kind of compass setting to get where we are going. I don't have to know the path, and I might wind around a bit, but I need to make progress in that direction.

I think story stalling is indicative of a lack of this direction to write in, or taking a wrong turn in the story so whatever ending you wanted is no longer going to work.

ALTERNATIVELY, if you don't think that is your problem, I know of another.

As Stephen King has said about his discovery writing, "Every story has to turn out somewhere." And he tells a story of slash and burn in writing "The Stand", he stalled out and felt he wasn't writing anything interesting anymore, and after a week of thinking about it, he put aside the last hundred pages or so of what he had written, and started over.

He'd made a wrong turn. He was writing true to his characters, and true to what felt real to him, but in doing that he had written a stalemate between the villain and his heroes, and he found a place earlier in the story to prevent that stalemate: A bomb that killed half the good guys; a massive setback that created chaos and put them all back on their heels.

So while King is right to say every story does have to come out somewhere, the author is still responsible for coming up with the plot twists, the setbacks your hero will suffer. You can still write her and the others true to their nature, but you can't just let them settle down into the domestic life of keeping house and going to work everyday; which is basically what happened to King's story. This is a story and things have to keep changing; the "settle down" into the new "normal world" is in the last pages of the book.

If your characters have settled into some sort of comfort zone, find out where that happened, what makes it a comfort zone, and disrupt it early. Introduce a crisis, a setback that forces them out of it. Break something. Cause an injury. Whatever she is fighting against or trying to achieve, kick her in the head. Give the villain a win, or the environment a win, but make her respond. You have to knock her down, or put a wall in front of her, to force her onto a new path.

Fortunately for you as an author, you can go back in time and kill these problems before they begin, as King did. If you have to discard a chunk like he did, you might still be able to salvage and re-purpose some of the imagination that went into that writing; dialogue, jokes, descriptions of places.

But delete and repeat is part of the territory in discovery writing, sometimes what we "discover" is that we made a wrong turn fifty pages ago, and it took that long in our discovery process to realize we've written ourselves into a dead end.

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