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“Shiny New Idea Syndrome”

Hey everyone, Abby here! Today I’m talking about “Shiny New Idea Syndrome,” a popular case among writers, and giving some tips on how to work with it or to defeat it.

What is “Shiny New Idea Syndrome”?

Put yourself in this situation. You’re a writer, you’re doing well, you’re minding your own business with your one story idea. It’s going great! Then one day, just as you finish working on your one project, a new idea presents itself to you and oh my GOSH, this is the best idea ever. It must be written immediately.

When you fall into this trap (multiple times), you probably have “Shiny New Idea Syndrome.” (We’re going to call it SNIS for the rest of this post.) SNIS is pretty much just what it sounds like. You constantly focus your attention on new and exciting ideas and end up leaving your old ones in the dust. For writers who want to make their stories into a career, it’s a dangerous affliction.

Working with SNIS

Maybe you’re like me and really do want to work on each new idea you get. Here are some of the methods I use that I think work the best for incorporating SNIS into your writing schedule:

Use a monthly calendar. You can print off a PDF of a monthly calendar and use it to organize your writing schedule. You don’t have to use a new calendar every month or label the days or anything like that; just use it to schedule which days you work on what project. The Calendar app for iOS also works well for this, but I would definitely recommend printing something off to have a material copy.

“Evolve” your ideas. This one is a bit harder to do but definitely helps you combat SNIS without jeopardizing your productivity. Take this brand new idea you have and dissect it. See what parts of it can be incorporated into your story, if any. Then your brand new idea has been put to work, and bam! You’re good. (Be careful with this one — using it too many times for one project could result in you trying to fit too much into one story.)

Develop it a little bit (a little bit) and set it aside. It’s not “just” an idea if you write it down and develop it slightly before setting it aside. This is my go-to method usually — Shiny New Ideas become projects more or less on the back-burner, and it makes it easier to focus on my main projects without a different idea trying to get my attention.

Combating SNIS

Or maybe these Shiny New Ideas are the absolute bane of your existence and you just want them gone so you can work on your current project without issue. Here’s some advice for that, too!

Make a commitment to your current WIP. I would most recommend a daily goal — maybe it doesn’t come in the form of a word or page count. But if you don’t want to lose your current WIP to SNIS, then daily goals may become your friend. Commit yourself to contributing to your current WIP until you get it to where you want it to be (usually published). Sometimes you need these goals all the way through, maybe you don’t. Whatever works!

Eliminate negativity about your writing. SNIS often occurs when your writing is starting to sag, but it is also prominent in writers who constantly belittle their own work. Usually people will work to avoid negativity, so trying to combat internalized negativity about this one WIP is what can often lead to the birth of your next idea. There are a few problems about this: a) it will happen continually with each project, because nobody is a perfect writer, and b) you’re using energy to belittle your WIP which is probably in its early stages, and that energy should go to editing instead so that you can improve.

Shiny New Idea Syndrome, while often regarded among writers as a sort of writing evil, isn’t always bad. In fact, it can sometimes help your writing if you keep it under control. I hope these tips helped you with your own SNIS (unless you don’t have it, in which case I envy you)!

So, that’s all I’ve got for today. If you have any questions or if there’s anything you want to see me talk about in my next post, please don’t hesitate to leave a message in my ask or in my messages! Until next time, much love! <333

lavendervalar

D316/365 // June 11 credit🌙 (pls don’t delete)

4:41 am

alloftheprompts

Themed Prompts: Murder Mystery

Your character comes home to find a body of a stranger in their bed.

You character has to solve their own murder before it happens.

Your character has to solve a murder mystery while preparing for a difficult exam.

Your character’s favorite coffee shop is the scene of the crime.

Two bodies are found in your character’s garage.

You character’s favorite teacher is murdered.

A person who threatened your character is now dead.

The victim predicted their own murder.

The killer leaves a cryptic note that references an event from your character’s childhood.

A recent murder offers a clue to a past mystery.

Your character has to solve a murder mystery on a space station.

Someone contacts your character to solve a crime no one else seems to know has happened.

Your character suspects someone close to them of being a murderer.

A seemingly random crime leads your character on a road to uncovering an ancient mystery.

Your character is both the culprit and the investigator.

lavendervalar

D337/365 // July 2 credit🌙 (pls don’t delete)

the mornings lately are amazing

lavendervalar

D318/365 // June 13 credit🌙 (pls don’t delete)

i’m so happy i wasn’t asleep at 4:30 this morning…

jamescullen

fictionwritingtips

Using Inaction to Raise the Stakes

Recently someone asked me how to raise the stakes of their novel without big action scenes and I thought this question deserved further attention. It’s important to remember that you don’t need to use action to create tension—there are other simple ways to do it.

Here are a few tips on using inaction to raise the stakes:

Effectively use silence

When a character doesn’t say something when they should, this can help build tension. If a character asks, for example, “Do you love me?” and the other person doesn’t answer—you’ve raised the stakes. It also works for something like, “Will you have my back when it comes down to it?” Meaning, will you support me when I need your help? When a character doesn’t respond or remains silent, a lot of questions are left up in the air for the readers. They just don’t know what’s coming. Learn how to use silence and how it can create tension in your story.

Do nothing

When a character knows something bad is happening and they remain inactive about it, that helps raise the stakes of your story. The readers are left wondering what it’s going to take to get your main character motivated to act. If you set up a world where action is dangerous and remaining complacent helps you stay alive, like most dystopian novels, doing nothing becomes a likely course of action (until the inciting incident). Most characters aren’t motivated to do anything in these types of novels until either they’re put in danger or something they love. This helps create tension because your readers can feel the situation building and they know something really bad needs to happen before action is taken.

Have your character hold back information

Sometimes your character is afraid to share information because they’re frightened of the repercussions of sharing something dangerous. Maybe they’ve been blackmailed or maybe they’re afraid something is going to get hurt. When your character holds back information and lies to someone close to them, the tension in your story builds. Raise the stakes of your novel by having your character not act on something they should. Fear is a good motivating factor when it comes to holding back information.

-Kris Noel

arsethetic-deactivated20150224

Patrick Belaga

coiii

socks featuring cookies and cool days!

lavendervalar

D295/365 // May 21 credit🌙 (pls don’t delete)

morning & evening

jessica154blog

Via***dhowelldesignsDonna

thewritershelpers

Can I Create Emotionally Complex Characters if I Don't "Get" People?

Hey there, community. Recently we received an anon message asking an extremely important question: could they, a person who is terrible at understanding people, still create emotional depth in characters? The more I thought about it, the more I realized this anon couldn’t be the only person worrying the same thing: is the development of my story dependent on my interpersonal skills? If I don’t understand people, am I bound to create shallow characters? With that on my mind, I decided to answer by speaking to you all in article form, since this is a widely-applicable concern. Anon, I hope this is helpful to you.

I’ll be speaking from the perspective of my own autism and the struggles I sometimes have with empathy. Bear in mind, followers, that there are many, many reasons people might struggle with interpersonal empathy and that everyone’s experience is vastly different, so take what you will from this and run with it. I mean to speak to as broad an audience as possible.

Character Development as a Codependent Process

So: Is it possible to improve your own understanding of people to improve your character development, and does the development of characters depend on this? Or is characterization a separate process entirely? The answer to both of those questions is yes. It is possible to improve interpersonal skills and learn how to understand people; there are a variety of ways to go about it. Often, you can use your character development as an exercise in teaching yourself how to understand people in real life. For me, a highly analytical person, that process has involved lots of reading, lots of thinking about why I love the characters I love, lots of character meta from other people talking about the characters they love (thanks, Tumblr), and a lot of long dinner conversations with my writing partner about how our characters respond to the environments we put them in. You’ll notice that most of those things have highly constructive elements. For me, the key to deepening my understanding of my characters - and therefore to creating emotional landscapes inside and between them - lies in treating them as complex, 3-D puzzles where every piece affects several other pieces and chain reactions are part of the norm.

It may seem contradictory, but the more I treat them objectively in terms of cause and effect - in other words, the more I think of them as intricate machines - the more organic my understanding becomes of how they think and feel, and why it matters.

So on one hand: yes, you can improve those skills, and you can even use your craft to help yourself do that. On the other hand, the mindset of using character development as a tool in that way necessitates a pre-existing mindset that character development, like our anon suggested, is its own process entirely.

Character Development as an Independent Phenomenon

Here’s what I mean: I spend a lot of time thinking about character development, psychology and interaction. I spend a lot of time talking about it. I’ve learned a lot about how to piece those things together to a) understand what makes my favorite characters tick and b) create realistic human impressions when I write about my own. In theory, I have emotional connections to those characters and an intimate understanding of how they work. Yet at the same time, I do not understand people in real life. I struggle to find empathy for people around me unless they’re already very, very close to me. My first reaction to other people is usually a negative one - I see only the very shallow, the very obvious, and the very stereotypical assumptions that are often made during flash judgements, and for me that’s usually as far as I get. That says nothing about my desire to get to know people or to show compassion for them; it just means that in day-to-day life, I don’t really understand them.

Does that affect my ability to create sympathetic, relatable, fascinating characters? Not really. The reason is because there is a fundamental difference between the spontaneity of our own human interactions and the scenarios we create for ourselves as we work. The first environment is real life: unplanned and uncontrolled, with lots of different wills bumping up against one another and no time for analysis. The second environment is where we hold all the strings. When we write, we enter a laboratory where every variable can be analyzed, understood, duplicated, altered and controlled by us and only us. Nothing happens that we don’t authorize. No character acts outside the bounds of our own understanding. In short, it’s a safe environment to explore in, and there’s no opposing consciousness to take control from us. That means replicating human empathy is a far easier, more foolproof, less time-sensitive endeavor.

And Here’s a Reminder:

You will gain points of emotional reference as you go about your life. Just as you develop an understanding of what types of things affect your characters emotionally, things will come along to affect you. To illustrate my point, here’s a personal example: six months ago, I learned what it meant to loathe someone so much it made you want to rip out fistfuls of their hair, claw their faces with your fingernails, and throw them out into the snow. From the same incident, I learned that I am far more easily angered when my friends are hurt than when I myself am hurt, and that my aggressive streak is the most dangerous when it comes to protecting people I love. Previously, I just thought I was an aggressive, vengeful prick who obsessed over people I didn’t like for far too long. The more you know, huh?

Most importantly, that incident gave me firsthand knowledge about how those emotions feel. The next time I sit down to write about an angry character, I know I’ll have new material to draw from. I’ll have better words to use and a more realistic end goal in mind. I’ll have an emotional experience I can manipulate to fit the needs and circumstances of whichever character is angry. And that’s the heart of what character development is, when you get down to it: it’s taking what you know of the human condition and pulling it apart to see what works (or what doesn’t). And just like we writers are always looking for new ideas, we should be keeping our eyes out for our emotional experiences, as well.

To summarize:

Yes, improving your empathy towards other people is possible. It takes practice and exercise, like any muscle, but for most people it is possible. And yes, it is also possible to experience the emotional development of your characters in a completely independent context. You can even have both happening at the exact same time, as I tried to illustrate above. How these processes manifest depends entirely on your experiences as a person and the methods you’ve developed so far as a writer.

Don’t forget, you’re still living. Experiences will come to you that will shape and deepen your understanding of people. You still have a lot to live and learn from - we all do.

So good luck to all of you writers out there, especially those of you who, like me, struggle with empathy. I have every confidence that with time and practice, you’ll come to your own understandings and find ways to think about these ideas that work for you. Now go out there and get developing!

–Senga