Story Writing Tips - Make Writing Fun Again 

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It happens to almost everyone who writes regularly.

There are times when writing starts to feel like a chore. The freshness and fun have gone out of it.

Here are a couple of mental strategies you can use to bring the fun back to your fiction writing.

1) Pretend you're not really writing.

You're just playing around.

Play with some story ideas. That's fun.

Daydream some scenes from your story. Daydreaming's fun -- especially if you do it when you're supposed to be doing something else (for example, in class or during a staff meeting).

While you're daydreaming, write down some notes so that you can remember the daydream later.

Then you can play with those notes, flesh them out. That's just an advanced kind of daydreaming.

If it still feels too much like work, choose something very casual and unprofessional to write on (a cocktail napkin, the subscription card inside a magazine).

Break out of your usual writing routine. If you normally write at home at your desk, take your writing to a park or a café. Or you can do it lying in bed, speaking out loud into a recording device. That doesn't feel like work, does it?

2) Pretend you're the story's main character.

Pretend that the story you're writing is really true and it happened to you. You're not imagining the story, you're remembering it.

For example, let's say you're writing a story about a vampire hunter. Pretend you are the vampire hunter.

Focus on your memory of that vampire attack. Try to recall all the feelings and details from the scene. You may have been blocking some parts of the memory because it's so upsetting, but now let it all come back.

Let yourself relive the moment when the vampire king leapt out of the closet, the horror you felt when you realized the weapons you'd brought were useless (you'd grabbed the wrong grocery bag, which was full of leeks instead of garlic).

Try to capture these memories on the page. You don't have to worry about writing well -- this is more of a diary.

Let the emotion of those memories drive your pen -- or typing fingers -- forward.

You might choose to write in the third person (using "he" or "she" instead of "I") if you don't want people to know that you were the hero who finished off the vampire king.

Maybe you prefer to keep a low profile, don't want the press beating down your door. So you can write it AS IF it were fiction.

But you know the truth...

Join our 8-week online course on character development.

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