Seriously, just start writing that story

I'm likely going to say some stuff that you've heard before, so forgive me if it comes off as condescending, but it sounds like you're diving deep into the really fun world-building aspect without having a guideline on how to turn that into a story.

First, you need an outline. I've no doubt you've heard this before, but an outline is the perfect place to figure out why you keep petering out after a few chapters. If you put it in an outline, you can easily see why one plot point won't carry through over another one.

It doesn't really matter how you outline. Could be on flashcards, could be in an Excel file, could be following The Hero's Journey, Freytag's Pyramid, the Save The Cat Beat Sheet, or your basic Three Act Structure. The point is you want to outline with a beginning, middle, and end as your goals, and any method that gets you there is grand.

The second reason I want you to do an outline first is to follow a piece of excellent advice I picked up in a screenwriting class, which is to make a choice, stick with it, and move onto the next one.

Let's say you're at an story wall. Your characters can drop everything they're doing and a) pursue an alleged murderer, b) stick around and try to solve the murder, or c) shrug their shoulders and move on toward defeating the wizard. None of these choices are bad, but one may work better to move your story forward better than the others. In an outline, you can commit to choice A and carry it forward until it's very clear that's not what is suited for your story. Then you can go back to where your plot went off the rails and find a better path forward. A couple of pages of discarded outline is way better than cutting five chapters, and those tweaks you want to make will be easier to do to your outline.

Second, and this is the hard part, you need to finish the first draft. Many authors end up with something vastly different than their first draft. I just attended a book signing with Martha Wells where she said that she often writes 10k words before finding the story she really wants to write. There are no wasted words, but you must finish the thing before you can make it into the story you want.

Sometimes where writing, particularly dialogue, can feel funky is the problem of voice, of that just doesn't sound like him, which can come down to individual words used. What's really interesting is this sense can ping even for characters you don't know at all, NPCs and background characters, not just the big main canon favorites that everyone knows intimately.

For example, I was writing a fic recently where I had typed out a character saying

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

And immediately had to backtrack because the word lucky felt wrong. I knew exactly what needed to go there instead without really thinking about it, but let's break it down a minute first.

Okay, so imagine you're me and lucky feels off, so what do you do? You turn to the thesaurus. This is what you get:

[alt text added to image; should pull through]

These aren't... wrong. (Well, some of them are.) Most of them are synonyms of lucky in various contexts, but they're not one-to-one by any means. So first you have to know that, in this spoken context of describing a person who avoided a potential negative outcome, only some of these will work, because it needs to be an adjective that has to address a moment of good luck (as opposed to a pattern or a lifetime) and avoiding that potential negative outcome by chance. Most of the time, you can sort these out by saying them out loud in your chosen sentence.

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt"

✅ Original sentence, construction works.

"He was serendipitous he wasn't more seriously hurt"?

🚫 No. That doesn't make sense at all.

"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."

✅ Yeah, that works, in a vacuum, too.

Of the above, in the sentence of dialogue I created, the following work:

Blessed

Fortunate

Lucky

Only three. (If I changed the sentence structure to "It was ___ he wasn't more seriously hurt," I could try out a few more, maybe, like fortuitous and providential, but I'm not going to.)

Even with only three options, especially in dialogue, you have to be able to parse out what kind of person would use which. That was why lucky pinged as off to me, even though it works perfectly well in this context in a vacuum.

In my scenario, the person speaking was a highly educated, upper socioeconomic middle-aged man of authority for whom American English is a first language speaking to another man with whom he has only a professional relationship, a reason to worry about his standing within the state of said relationship, and a vested interest in maintaining a healthy level of respect and trust.

That is not a man who is going to say lucky.

I knew immediately and instinctively that he would say

"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."

He wouldn't say blessed unless I wanted to imply something about his religious and/or spiritual background and beliefs, which I did not. Lucky has a more common feel to it, a little more casual, and just wouldn't be the word of use for this kind of character in this situation. Reaching for the three-syllable word instead of the two, the one that echoes with a tiny bit more pomp.

You'll notice, too, that a that appeared as well, because a man like the character I described would be more particular about the formalities of grammar, even in cases where his meaning is clear without them.

A different character, someone of a lower socioeconomic status and/or in a much more casual situation might even say

"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

Do you see how those four ways of saying the exact same thing sound and feel different?

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

The exact same sentiment, just tweaked to match the speaker.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

do they actually move toward what they desire? how far are they willing to go for it? do they pursue their desires directly or indirectly? do they acquire what they desire through force, trickery, or negotiation? do they tell themselves they aren't supposed to feel desire and suppress it? does the suppressed desire wither away and die, or does it mutate and grow even stronger? is the initially expressed desire actually an inadequate and poorly translated different desire that they lack language for? does the desire change once the language has been updated, or when new experiences outline the desire more clearly? do they want something else once they have better words for it, or once they know that they definitely don't want something they thought they wanted before?

how does the world accommodate those desires? what does the world present to your character and in what order to update and clarify their desires? how does your magic system or sci-fi device correspond to those desires and the pursuit of them?

listen. i’m not here to sell you a productivity system or convince you that waking up at 5am will make you a novelist. i am deeply Not That Girl. HOWEVER, here are 5 chaotic little writing habits that quietly rearranged my brain chemistry:

✏️ typing BEFORE i know what happens i used to think i had to outline everything before writing. wrong. i get more done when i let the scene surprise me. just start with vibes and a line of dialogue. the rest shows up once you start moving.

🗣️ saying the scene out loud like a play no joke. talking my scenes out like a script?? life-changing. the pacing, the emotion, the rhythm of it all makes more sense when i act like i’m gossiping about my blorbos in a voice memo.

⌛ 20-minute timers (not for productivity, just to start) i tell myself “just 20 minutes.” sometimes i stop. sometimes i blink and it’s 2 hours later and someone’s been emotionally eviscerated in chapter 12. this one’s black magic. use wisely.

🕯️ re-reading my WIP like a book no editing, no judging, just reading through with snacks like it’s already published. changes how i see the pacing and emotional arcs. also reminds me it doesn’t completely suck.

🧂 leaving in the messy parts i used to delete scenes that felt “off.” now i just write a little comment like “THIS IS BAD BUT KEEP GOING.” turns out momentum matters more than vibes. shocking, i know.