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[rose_in_shadow]

So, my fellow fanfic writers, what do you do when you have two characters in a room who won't behave? And I don't mean "wont' behave" in the good way when the characters seem to take on a life of their own outside of your plans for plot and whatnot. I'm talking about when you have two characters who simply stare at each other and do nothing in a

Comments

[voyevoda]

I don't know if this helps at all, but in regards to an ending, I usually do some free-flow brainstorming. I start with point A, then branch off to another Point B, but slap on any C,D,E points that come into my head and ultimately I choose one and branch off that. Even if the idea seems stupid, I put it down, because something else might pop into my brain. :)

Ultimately they end up looking like this:



And that page is actually entirely in regards to one character's motivations, which turned into how I'm ending the story. :P Alas I still lack parts of my middle so the story remains unfinished.

As for when characters just won't seem to behave, if I can't just seem to get something 'right' I'll do the unthinkable, painful thing...I'll take a deep breath, delete it all, and start over. :) That's just me, though. I find if it isn't working for me, it won't work for the readers either (perhaps even less so).

[sinvraal]

Haha, stuff like this makes me feel inadequate. The amount of notes I keep is laughable. I have a 'notepad' file, which I jot things down in occasionally, but nothing even close to an outline like this.

[saeori]

I'm the same when it comes to this. Don't feel too badly!

[voyevoda]

I also have notepad files! *lol*

Truthfully this sheet is for a particular fic that has been my 'opus' of sorts- still unfinished five years running, two total rewrites that rendered it completely unrecognizable from the original, but always in my head trying to figure out how to finish it. I'm hoping my trip to Paris in two weeks (where the fic is set) might break me out of an almost 2 year writing block.

Most of my fics never get to this level of brainstorming. I keep a lot of it in my head unless the plot is complicated. :P

[rose_in_shadow]

Holy braintstorming! lol. I sometimes have notes and things that I type down so I won't forget, but nothing like this.

Still, throwing in something and seeing what kind of ending it will produce might work. :)

[voyevoda]

Well, this is literally my brain barfing out anything that comes to mind (you know that game where someone says a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind? Sort of like that). I use maybe 10% of what actually ends up on the page. Also some of that writing is quotes I took inspiration from, or little character lines I want to insert into the dialogue at certain points, heh.

Free flowing brainstorming works great for me, though. I just put something down as the original thought and then put anything at all that comes into my head, no matter how asinine. Some I never explore, others I go into greater detail (there's one thought trail that I went into quite detail and ultimately rejected because I just couldn't make it make sense).