Nothing romantic about writing

Since I'm not a professional writer, who learned this craft for years and years in school or university, I always felt a little insecure about my process (and still does).

Do I really have the right (and firm) base to allow my story to stand on?

Do I miss important parts by not being able to define the main idea, concept and premise? And on that subject: what each of them really means (and what's the difference between them?)

I sometimes get so confused by all those terms that I feel it's holding me back rather than help me. And I won't lie, it's frustrating for me that I don't always understand the terminology or know how to use it to my advantage.

For years I was trying to be a writer and failed. I didn't know what I was doing wrong.

I would have an idea and then start writing a story based on that. It would be so great for about 20-30 pages but then it will just stop flowing and I will be permanently stuck. Sometimes I tried to revise the story thinking this might help, but no, I would write new 20 pages just to get stuck again.

It was after many attempts at writing my first story "Over and over" (then called "ex marks the spot") and failing, that I realized I should take a break and get a little educated. I decided to read some books about writing and luckily for me I started with "Story" by Robert Mckee*. I remember reading it, so amazed at how accessible and technical (in a good way) it all was. I was completely blown away. After I finished reading the book I read it again - this time making notes on a google doc for future reference.

All those years trying to be a writer I approach writing as something romantic instead of work.

I would just sit and write, thinking this is the process: the story is being dictated from my mind to my hand. Being stuck at some point just felt like I didn't really had the whole story to tell.

What I was failing to understand is that having a story in my mind is not like having a story written down, so it's not just a transfer of data from my mind to the computer - it has to be processed and organized first.

After reading "Story", I realized I need to start from something general and build more and more details on it, and that's how a story should be made (it's a little simplified but that's the gist of it). The important thing is that you got to have something written in order to elaborate on it, so writing freely was not an option (at least not for me, I'm sure there are people that actually can do it). And although at first I was a bit disappointed with that, after playing around with this new planning approach I fell in love with it.

So what is that starting point we build the story on?

it can be a lot of things, actually. I love to use the "what if" approach because there is something inherently anti-cliché about it - It will always challenge the mundane with: "yeah, but what if it was different?"

For example:

Love story. Nothing more general than that, right? so:

What if the lovers were aliens?

What if just one of them was secretly an alien?

What if the woman was a secret agent?

What if in the world they were living in love was a crime?

What if they were already married to other people?

What if one of them was dying?

So you see, just by asking a simple "what if" you can turn a simple love story into something that will still utillize a love story but also add something fresh to it (by the way, don't be afraid to really go far with this. You don't have to use anything but it's a great exercise to find something interesting and unique).

You can also think about it this way, imagine you finish your story (yay!) and now someone searching for it on Google:

If they will need to find it only based on "love story" they will need to go through millions of results until reaching your story (and maybe will just give up and settle for another story from all the millions of results). But what if they were searching for "a love story of 2 aliens"? There would probably be less results to go through. Having a unique idea will also force you to come up with new plots and not do the same things we already saw too many times before.

* This is a link to "Story" by Robert Mckee:

https://www.amazon.com/Story-Structure-Substance-Principles-Screenwriting-ebook/dp/B0042FZVOY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=story+robert&qid=1618775372&sr=8-1