Why am I so bad at writing?

So other people have already told you about different methods to write and have assured you that not having it "together" when you start the story or even halfway through is not unusual for a writer. This is all pretty normal stuff in the hell that is drafting. So I'm not going to add to all that sage advice

rquinlivan said:

My characters' motivations make no sense and I don't really know where any of this is going.

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Instead, I'm going to point you in a couple of directions that helped me with my character motivations and how knowing those motivations helped me structure the plot.


Robin LaFevers wrote several blog posts on her process of determining and planning out her characters' motivations.

I also like some of the exercises in the snowflake method.

Finally, I read Save the Cat! It's pretty formulaic, but he spends some time talking about character motivations at the scene level—that every character enters not just the story but even each scene with a goal and motivation and that the scene should drive toward that goal, answering it in some way. It helped me connect some of my scenes to my characters where the story was, otherwise, falling flat.

rquinlivan said:

Oh, I have tons of problems writing short stories. It's just that the cost of scrapping large sections of it and starting over is quite low.

However, this obviously does not scale well to a novel-length work! Imagine writing 90,000 words of a novel, then having to scrap 80,000 words of it. That might be a year's worth of work. I have run into this exact scenario, in fact, and this is the source of my motivation to get better at outlining. Going back to the house analogy, I don't want to work on the roof shingles until I'm 100% sure that the foundation is set properly.

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I don't have to imagine this. I DID it. Three times in the past six years. It's how you learn the craft. It's how you learn what's good and what isn't, what path got you to this point (so you can avoid it in the future), and maybe at the end of the day, you can salvage something from the wrecking ball.

But I still don't outline. I let the story grow organically. And each draft I go through gets me closer to the end goal. That doesn't mean I'm exactly a pantser, either. I know my characters. I know my end goal. The stuff in the middle is the fun stuff, the stuff I discover along the way.

Do I regret the thousands of words I've thrown away? No. Not for a second. Those are my dues, and I'm getting close to having paid them all. (I think.)

I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I know, good writing is character-based, in almost all circumstances. If you can't make everything up as you go, and you can't plan the entire novel in advance, it might help to write several pages about each character. Make them detailed-- make sure to include a detailed backstory. You probably will never use half of what you write about each character, but hopefully, you will be able to connect to your characters, and understand them. You can then make motivations that make sense, and know how each character will respond to any given situation. It's sort of like planning your characters instead of what's going to happen in the book itself.

Also, you said that you're not sure what form of outlining works for you. This is just a suggestion, but I really enjoy the Snowflake method. You don't have to follow all the steps, or you can include more, if you want, but it helps clarify exactly what you want in your book.

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

That's probably my favorite explanation of it, so if you haven't heard of it, I'd reccomend giving that website a look.

Usher said:

Are you listening to your characters?

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A simple question, but to me the most critical part of writing a novel. Sometimes I know the beginning, sometimes I know the ending, and sometimes I know some of the scenes within the book. If I know the beginning, I write that first. If I know the ending, I jot a few lines down about that, and if I know some of the scenes, I jot a few lines down about each one and then try to place them in order. But the most important point comes after that. I imagine myself as part of the story, an observer, or the person being told the story, and let my characters tell it. This often happens as I'm lying in bed waiting for sleep. This is when I discover whether or not I need to outline, or if I can write the story by the seat of my pants. If the story they tell is clear, then I write without outlining. If it's vague, then I make an outline, hoping that will provide clarity.