Working on an upcoming horror short story and I’ve come to realize, my brain has some real hard stops when I don’t have all the “logistics” figured out for my story.
Maybe it comes with the territory of science fiction, but I need to understand at some level, the basics of how my world “works” and those need to be relatively believable in order for me to properly dig in and really live in the world the way I need to in order to write properly.
For example, when writing this story about a guy who goes on a cruise to view this once in a life time cosmic event, this event goes wrong, and so forth.
I started with the cruise ship being big. Like BIG.
A lot of the world building was about how large and impressive this ship was. At first this was fine, it flowed nicely in the story and gave the reader some nice visualization.
The issue I found was once the story got going, this ship being as big as it was became a problem, at least in my mind.
I had an outline for the story, a rough one but it gave me the basic A -> B I needed, or so I thought. Turns out when it’s time to drive, you kinda have to know the roads not just the end destination.
Okay, so he needs to get to the med bay, well where is that? and how does he get there? Is there stairs nearby or an elevator? How many hallways and corridors are involved? Do I need to draw an accurate schematic of this fake ship? Cus I will!
Of course, it’s very easy to go too far in this, giving the reader too much information about the surroundings that seem important, but really just bog down the story. I try to keep a healthy mix that grounds the reader where they are, while keeping the story moving along.
So to solve my issue, I lowered the scope. I made the ship smaller to fit the smaller nature of the story. Something I wouldn’t need an engineering degree to navigate around.
I also made a cheat sheet, a little dollop of information in my writing I can refer to that has just enough information for my brain to properly immerse itself and write without block. I’ll show you here.
This is just something that I found helpful in getting past some stubborn writers block I was having.
Remember, your writing is you. Don’t be afraid to listen to how your brain creates and enjoy the process.
