Emergency plot surgery II

When all else fails, write a murder mystery. These can be set in absolutely any genre, and can be as bloody, grimly serious or sickly funny as you like.

Choose a genre and a setting. You want pirates? You got 'em. you'd rather be writing high fantasy about The Knights of the round table? That's good too. Vampires and werewolves? Grow up. That's so six months ago. But you can still have a murder mystery peopled with vampires and lycanthropes, if you must.

Concoct six characters. They can be pretty cliched, that doesn't matter. They'll develop as you write. Then create a victim. Randomly assign the character's a motive for killing him/her (money, lust, jealousy, revenge and so on ...). Make one of your characters your investigator. Have them start by explaining why they would have killed the victim. Then have the MC casually admit that somone beat them to it, but (here's the clever bit) everyone thinks the MC did it. So the MC has to clear his or her name ...

Emergency plot surgery

I've been really nervous the last day or so. Ditching a plan and deciding to wing it - AGAIN - suddenly seems like a really bad idea. But there's no going back. Whatever is going on will have to work itself out over the next thirty days, as I write. Or not. That might have to wait until editing. Doesn't matter.

So if I'm nervous, some of you must be panicking. Please, don't. Take a breathe. Write. If you don't know what to write about, invent a couple of characters - A BARBARIAN WARRIOR and a SLEEK ELVEN ARCHER (or equivalents appropriate to your genre) and put them in an odd situation. Perhaps the BARBARIAN mistakes the ELF for a woman and propositions him. If that isn't enough, send in a DWARF, who picks a fight with the ELF, only to have the BARBARIAN throw him out the window for harrassing the BARBARIAN'S girl. You see how this works?

It doesn't matter if whatever you are writing falls to pieces. The important thing is to be writing - we can always fix the pieces, later. We can't fix something that isn't there. Once you finish writing for the night, take a few minutes to think about what you want to cover tommorrow. That way, your unconcious mind can start putting ideas together over night.