Trouble With Your Novel? Try This!

In which I share an easy tip to try if you get stuck in the writing of your novel. 

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Hello everyone! I have been working on my current novel for…hmm…probably at least a year now, actually. And it’s been going pretty slow. Until yesterday, when I did something so simple and ridiculous it shouldn’t even have worked.

I changed the POV.

I know, it’s probably not advice that  you’ve never heard before. I know I’ve heard it a modest estimate of 590 bajillion times. But it really, really works!

You see, I’d convinced myself that I needed to write in first person with this novel, even though I’m more comfortable in third. I thought that since my protagonist does some pretty unlikeable things, the reader would have to be in his head or they’d hate him.

But it turned out that he just was not a great storyteller, and it got to a point where I was really having a hard time moving the story forward. So, finally, after months of slogging along, I decided to give up my idea of how it had to be and just try third person.

And guess what? Now I cannot stop writing! I’m back to that stage where I’m absolutely in love with my story. I know it won’t last, but for now, it feels really good, and I think that even once I hit that first roadblock, it will be a little easier to get over now.

So if you’re currently working on a novel and it just doesn’t seem to be moving forward, try switching the POV. Even if you end up switching back, it might give you a new perspective or at least make writing interesting again.

The other lesson to learn here is that we really need to avoid getting ideas into our head of the way the story has to be told. There’s no right way. There’s no rigid way we need to stick to. Stories can be told a myriad of ways, and that’s a pretty darn good thing for us writers, because there are really only so many stories to be told, and if each of those stories only had only one right way to tell it, well, we’d probably have exhausted those by now. That would be it. No more new books.

Besides sharing that tip, I wanted to let you know that I might be posting a little bit less because I will be concentrating a bit more on my novel. Still expect a couple posts a week, but probably not daily.