Is this normal when writing a book?

I am currently writing a book and I have had the story and character ideas in my head for many years, but it doesn't seem to translate when I am writing it. I am about 35 pages in and there is one section I am extremly happy with and another I just can't get right. Most of it I am satisfied with, but not as happy as would like to be. I know which events I want to happen, but I don't always know how to get there.

I don't know if any of that makes sense, or if anyone here has written a book, but is this a normal happening? I feel like it should just flow, but it isn't.

Yes, it's normal. I find it's easier if you jump around and write the parts that stick out in your head, and then go back and work on connecting them.

Yeah, that happens. The trick is to just FORCE yourself to keep writing even if you hate it. I cannot stress this enough. Then you can go back and fix it in editing. It's painful (editing is worse than writing in my experience), but it works.

What I have been trying to do is get the ideas out there and then go back and add to it. Its just such a good story idea but I just can't get it right :(

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Originally Posted by shion

What I have been trying to do is get the ideas out there and then go back and add to it. Its just such a good story idea but I just can't get it right :(

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Yes, and it's perfectly normal to feel that way. Just keep writing. If you hit a bit of writer's block at a particular segment, just write something quick and fast to get past that part and then come back and edit it later.

It's normal to want to compare yourself to your favorite book or whatnot. But it's important to keep in mind that those books aren't perfect either. I learned this when I was smack in the middle of the painful process of editing one of my first drafts. I went to read one of my favorite books for inspiration, and all I wanted to do was scribble all over the book with my red pen, the same way I wanted to with my draft. That's when I realized that it's okay to be imperfect. And it's especially okay for first drafts to be imperfect.

You could always do what I do: Write until you don't want to write anymore, and then stop, and never share what you've written with anybody. You'll never get published that way, but I never understood peoples' obsession with publishing. Writing for its own sake is rewarding.

I haven't finished a writing project in 10 years. I've also never done editing/rewrites. I only do the enjoyable portion of writing and to hell with the rest. You'll never catch me at those workshops like Clarion where professional writers read over the best you can churn out and call it rubbish. If I want to pay good money to go someplace where perfect strangers will be incredibly rude to me, I shall purchase a bus ticket to Toronto.

Bleys has good advice. Don't worry about editing or going crazy with trying to perfect it if it's just for your own personal enjoyment. Honestly I always found editing to be about ten times more painful than writing, and I find writing to be a pretty excruciatingly painful process.

(SPOILER)And yet I have to do it, because I go absolutely crazy if I don't. It is, somewhat irritatingly, part of who I am xD

Pike is pretty much right on all accounts.
The problem is that you know the story by heart in your mind, but you don't know it on a paper. There's missing holes that nyou are discovering. They don't matter, but you need them to advance the plot, and then it feels like they should matter if you include them, which means that you need to make up more stuff, and that's hard work that you weren't ready to commit to when you started writing the book.
(SPOILER)And that ^^ is a run-on sentence

And so the unfortunate conclusion is that writing is hard as hell, even if you're writing a story that has been solidified in your mind your whole life.
I have the same thing going on, and, frankly, I can't even get past the main character's bio when I write it down. In fact, so many character are so important that I second guess who the main character is, who's point of view it needs to be told from etc. It may be impossible to write because I know it so well, yet cannot explain without mind transplants.
Hopefully, that sort of thing will be possible via some Asimov-esque virtual reality someday.

LOL I tend to follow the Bleys method.

When I wrote (purely for fun) it was sometimes with a friend. If I got stuck I'd pass the work off to him/her. Since we both developed the story together, it was sometimes beneficial to let the other person write until they were stuck and share back and forth.

Writing something with the opposite sex also gives the work a unique blend.

Unless this story is very personal, you could try talking to a friend about it and seeing if they want to jump on board. Even if they don't want to write, friends are great people to abuse horribly by bouncing ideas off of them over some coffee or sushi.

Oh man, going off of what sharky is saying...

When I was in high school a group of friends and I had this thing we called "The Notebook" which we would pass around during lunch. We would all write a couple of sentences of this ongoing nonsense story and then pass it on to the next person, so it was basically equally written by about four or five different people.

And you know, it turned out amazing. I mean, we were all filling in each others' weaknesses with our strengths, we all brought a unique sense of humor to the project and we actually managed to keep it somewhat coherent and on track. That whole thing was a blast.

So I actually do have to recommend a collaborative attempt, if you have some good friends and wouldn't mind help. It is a whole lotta fun.

Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry and the team from the Miami Herald all did a chapter by chapter book (A different person wrote each chapter, basically) called Naked Came the Manatees.
Masterpiece.
(SPOILER)Carl Hiaasen, despite that his writing is ludicrous pulp fiction and against the hopes and dreams of my professors and colleagues, is my idol.

I think it's normal - I try to write character profiles (general description, motivations, past experiences) then decide on a few events, then use the characters' profiles to fill in the blanks -

So if the house catches fire, Donny would likely run for his life, forsaking anyone else to fend for themselves, but Megan would definitely try to save every living soul within. Then when everyone is safe and the fire department arrives, she doesn't chastise him because she knows he has a troubled past filled with tragic situations where his life has been threatened... But he feels the need to apologize and make amends...

Etc.

Thanks for the replies. I don't think I will ever get it published because I refuse to let anyone I know read it.
Me: Can you read and give me feedback?
Person: Sure.
Me: No, don't, you might think it's stupid.
Person: *Blank stare......walk away*

I just have to write it. I know that may sound wierd, but I just have to. I've been writing it in my mind since I was honestly, nine or so and I just have to get it on paper. What Martyr said was almost on point. I have certain events 100% planned out, but inbetween, I'm blank, and that's where it gets hard. Or if I have something perfect in my mind, but I can't write it properly.

I'm gonna keep trying though.

Can you guys read it and give me feedback? :tongue:

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Originally Posted by Pike

Oh man, going off of what sharky is saying...

When I was in high school a group of friends and I had this thing we called "The Notebook" which we would pass around during lunch. We would all write a couple of sentences of this ongoing nonsense story and then pass it on to the next person, so it was basically equally written by about four or five different people.

And you know, it turned out amazing. I mean, we were all filling in each others' weaknesses with our strengths, we all brought a unique sense of humor to the project and we actually managed to keep it somewhat coherent and on track. That whole thing was a blast.

So I actually do have to recommend a collaborative attempt, if you have some good friends and wouldn't mind help. It is a whole lotta fun.

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I did something really similar in high school with another friend, except we made a comic out of an 800 page notebook. It was mostly the two of us, but it was funny. People would ask for it to read it when they were bored, and were welcome to add to it if they wanted. We played around with the comic the whole time we were in highschool, but by the final year we rarely got a chance to work on it because some one was always wanting to read it. :jess: It was a stupid, fun little was of time.

Or you could try something like tGA. I've developed a lot as a writer from playing tGA, although I still tend to write so much plot that the actual game never gets anywhere near caught up.

Some of my funniest material has been at tGA. We've tried to do something similar here at EoFF in the past (Magestar and I think a couple of other ones that lasted up to a week) but it never took off. We also tried it at GHF, but the only thing I remember about it was the awful sex scene I wrote, hoping that it would turn into an in-joke.

EDIT: Actually, it hasn't been done here in a while, so I'm going to write up a proposal in the Writer's Corner forum. Sod that, I took one look at the RP subforum and ran for my life. So many one-post and one-reply threads. There's no way EoFF could ever support a proper collaborative attempt. Besides, I've got nothing funny.

To embellish on my answer - most of my writing is done in my head. I have hundreds of ideas a week for writing, but most of them never touch paper or word processor. However; I've been writing a bit more lately. I came to a big realization that I'm more suited to write short stories, so I've been more eager to put them into form.

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Originally Posted by shion

I am currently writing a book and I have had the story and character ideas in my head for many years, but it doesn't seem to translate when I am writing it. I am about 35 pages in

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This is indeed very most abnormal. The majority of people "writing a book" have everything in their head but havent written a single word :p

Just break it down and write a narrative treatment first. There's a lot to be said, not just for writing a book, about planning things out on paper first.

I agree with Bleys. RPing at tGA is basically like collaborative creative writing, and it allows you to try different kinds of things with your writing. I'm like Bleys in that regard because tGA has helped me overcome some writing problems and has also allowed me to try to take my characters into different situations and see how to write from there. When I was unsure of how to proceed in a short story I was writing for the university, I used the idea first in tGA RP to see how well it worked and how others reacted to it. Once I saw what worked and what didn't, I could go back to my original piece and edit it, thus overcoming that particular obstacle in writing. And RPing at tGA is just fun in general (especially with Bleys's Scun posts which are always a riot to read), so that's an added plus. The plot's still ongoing if you wanna join in on the fun. ;)

I've also suffered from the "chronological" storytelling block. The easiest solution to that is to just write out of order and later bridge in the gaps. Another tip is to just write what comes to your mind and worry about "perfecting" it later. I tend to sketch ideas and just write whatever comes to my mind, and later I pick out good ideas from the trash and figure out how to work them into the narrative. It's challenging, but that's part of the fun of writing. Try different points of view, different events, different reactions, different tone, and see what ultimately works best for you. Sometimes having music playing in the background helps to set the mood and can be inspiring in general (at least it is for me). :)

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Originally Posted by blackmage_nuke

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Originally Posted by shion

I am currently writing a book and I have had the story and character ideas in my head for many years, but it doesn't seem to translate when I am writing it. I am about 35 pages in

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This is indeed very most abnormal. The majority of people "writing a book" have everything in their head but havent written a single word :p

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This!

If you've written at all, you're farther along than most people!

Yeah, all that you mentioned in the first post is normal. Right now I'm having some trouble actually continuing a certain scene in my book. Usually after I watch a good movie it comes into play easily and I tried writing after that last night and it didn't really help because it was past 2 in the morning so I was too sleepy to do anything. If it wasn't that late then for damn sure I would've written at least 2 pages.

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Originally Posted by Citizen Bleys

You could always do what I do: Write until you don't want to write anymore, and then stop, and never share what you've written with anybody. You'll never get published that way, but I never understood peoples' obsession with publishing. Writing for its own sake is rewarding.

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That just sounds straight up foolish to me. How can one improve without being aware of their flaws? i know you can catch some stuff on your own, but there will always be someone who'll see something that you don't. I also highly disagree with righting on its own sake is rewarding. Why waste all that time frustrating yourself when you're just going to keep it to yourself? I could've just kept the whole thing in my head without all the frustration.

One thing I do know is that once you get the book done everything else will be easier. All you have to do is edit. Correcting grammar and spelling errors is boring, but picking up on any plot holes, bad/weird sounding dialogue is the fun part.

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

One thing I do know is that once you get the book done everything else will be easier. All you have to do is edit. Correcting grammar and spelling errors is boring, but picking up on any plot holes, bad/weird sounding dialogue is the fun part.

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That's subjective; I LOATHE editing. Worst thing ever. I'll write all day (and I don't even like the process of writing that much), but editing makes me want to curl up in the fetal position somewhere and sob.

As for writing for its own sake being rewarding-- I do think it is. I've written entire novels that I don't plan on showing anybody (before I started writing ones that I would, in fact, like to show people someday, and have done so). I don't have a single regret about them. I learned so much from writing those early proto-novels, and they were, in fact, very, very rewarding to finish. :)

Editing is absolutely the most abominable experience I have ever undergone as a writer. It means I have to read what I wrote, and doing so causes me to be aware of just how awful it is. Not in any editable, improvable sense, just a general belief that it's completely meritless and awful.