Talking About Your Story Might Stop You From Actually Writing It

If you're friends with a writer, chances are good you've experienced what it's like when one of us has a story to tell. Under good circumstances you can sit with us over dinner and coffee, and spend hours exploring this strange world that lives inside our skulls. Under bad circumstances, you get drenched by the downpour that comes with our brainstorms.

However, there's an issue that I've found a lot of writers have... namely that once we've opened our mouths that we often forget to engage our hands, and actually write the stories we talk about.

It is, unfortunately, the hardest part of the process.

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Undercutting The Process

Before we go any deeper into this topic I want to be very clear, here; talking through your story is always a good idea. For a lot of writers it is an extremely necessary part of the process, allowing us to explore certain ideas, think out loud, and to get around problems in the plot.

With that said, sometimes writers get so enamored of talking about our stories that we don't actually write them. Put another way, it's like we showed up to bake a cake, but instead we just ate all the icing and called it a day.

If you slather it on thick enough, it will still support candles, right?

What I mean by just eating the icing is that, for a lot of writers, talking about the idea is the fun part of the process. Taking notes, building the world, engaging with the characters, asking questions, and sharing all of that with our friends is usually an engaging activity. It's where we have the most fun, and it's where we get the satisfaction of feedback, and sharing an experience with someone else.

However, this activity can actually make us take a shortcut past the actual hard work of writing the story if we aren't careful. Because we sat down and talked through the tale, we walked someone through all of the twists and turns, and explained the ending and themes we're going for, our brains then lose interest in it. It doesn't want to actually write that story anymore. Now it wants a new idea to get excited about, and to go through the whole process of exploration again.

This can be exhausting for everyone involved. If you're the writer who finds themselves constantly avoiding the final step of writing the story, you may feel like you're constantly caught between the boring drudgery of forcing yourself to chronicle an idea you're no longer interested in and taking hits of good brain chemicals while you daydream about newer, more exciting ideas. Those who get pulled into these exercises might also feel tired after a while because for all the fun of the creative process, it can feel like the story is never going anywhere; that it's all just a bunch of hot air that's never going to lead to anything.

How do you fix it, though?

Sadly, I don't have an answer to this. If I did, I'd write a book, become a bestseller, and retire. But the best advice I can give is that you need to want the book done more than you want the enjoyment of just playing around in another sandbox. I'm not saying you shouldn't think about other ideas, and that you shouldn't give yourself moments of play and fun while you're slogging through a novel, but you need to make sure that you don't abandon the story you had just because you've moved from drawing the blueprints to actually building the thing.

If I do find more useful tricks, though, rest assured that I'll share them as soon as I come across them!

Looking For Some Additional Reading?

I don't really have any neat segues, but I figured I'd leave some additional links for folks who just want to kill a little time, and help me out a bit. If you're down for giant robots fighting alien bugs in a life-or-death battle in the grim darkness of the far future, check out Broken Heroes if you haven't seen it yet! If you'd like to step into an ongoing saga about resistance to fantasy fascists, and the deeds of a shadowy vigilante attempting to free the city from the boot on its neck, then read the first of The Silver Raven Chronicles!

And if you're a fan of the World of Darkness, you should definitely take a moment or three to listen to the latest adventure Jacoby has found himself on in The Butcher's Door, dramatized below! Don't forget to subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel if you enjoy it, as well.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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