Month: April 2022

When I can’t make progress on a story for one reason or another, it’s like I’ve run into a roadblock. Despite having a lot of great ideas for it and that I’ve planned it out, I can’t make progress on it. It’s as if writing the story has been hindered by an unseeable force, causing me to struggle each time I try to add a sentence to it.

Sometimes that roadblock can happen a day after a great writing session. It’s like the story has just decided to quit, and I don’t know how to keep the story going. The roadblock happened out of nowhere, and now I’m completely baffled by the situation.

To overcome this, I usually have to wait–give it time for the roadblock to disappear. At other times, I’ll try taking the story in a new direction–a direction that offers new twists and turns to keep my interest piqued in the story. Or I might put the story aside and work on a new story altogether.

Surprisingly enough, after a few weeks or months, that story that I had put aside will read like new to me, and I’ll be excited to work on it again.

One aspect that I enjoy about writing is adding details. Details can give a scene realism and paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the environment. They provide an added layer of depth that makes the scene and characters stand out.

But details can be overdone, and when they are, it can be tiring to read through. It’s like reading a passage with a bunch of superfluous and ornate words, and by the time you get through it, you wonder what you just read. The same can happen with an overabundance of details. The long list of details make it seem like everything that was described was important, but at the expense of exhausting the reader’s memory and patience.

For me, adding details give more depth to a story and the characters (such as their backstory), and it helps the reader to visualize the events that are taking place. But when the details pile up to the point that there are too many things to remember, it can have the opposite effect that was intended.