: Re: Why can't I write something longer than a few pages? I write short stories, a lot of short-shorts. I would say the longest thing I've actually finished writing is "Lord of Snakes", which was

@Candy753

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I used to suffer from the same disease. This is how I dealt with it:

I started looking at each character as a "short story." This is truth for any novel; every character produces a subplot which is somehow connected with the main one.

I accepted that a novel can never be perfect. As the saying goes: "You write a novel when you don't know what you want to say or how you want to say it." So look at your novels as little lab experiments instead of something that has to be perfect.

If none of this works for you, you can try this:

Write a novel that consist on many intertwined short stories. David Mitchell does this beautifully on his magnus opus Cloud Atlas.

Write two or three parallel stories. Haruki Murakami does this pretty well in his novel 1Q84. The two protagonists alternate in each chapter (a third one is added in the middle).

Hope this helps. Good luck.

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