I have stories in my head ( broad strokes). I can vividly imagine narrative moments in media res that I would love to do justice to by filling out the before and after. I create personalities in my head that I talk to and could transcribe. I know what themes and motifs I would like to touch… but every time I sit down to actually try and drag these imaginings into reality my mind goes blank. I sit, I struggle, I am at a crossroad amidst a blank void.
How do I learn how to give structure to this impulse to create fiction? Where do I learn how to create a program or methodology that allows me to take these abstract yearnings and give them a concrete form?
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.
Throwing together a rough summary out of bullet points can help break through that initial mind-blanking. I used to do that, just make an outline of a story with bullet points, save it as its own file, then copy it into a new file and start elaborating on each point, deleting the old bullet point once there’s actual text to replace it. That way you have the original summary to work with even as you clean up the actual rough draft.
Eventually it stopped being necessary or helpful, but it served as a decent method for learning away the mind-blanking effect of sitting down to a blank page.
To add to this: pre-writing in general can help you organize your thoughts and get you asking questions about how things fit together, which can lead to new ideas or help you plug plot holes. Word maps, simple who-what-when-where-why summaries to hone your focus, simple sketches to help you figure out how a location is laid out so you know this character is coming this way and this one goes that way for your chase/cat-and-mouse thriller scene, or just figuring out what the scenery looks like so you know what sorts of details to add.
Don’t feel self-conscious about the things you do to help you flesh out your story. If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.