Take a fairytale, myth or story you know well. Alice in Wonderland, Prometheus, Cinderella, etc.

Take a genre/setting you've never written about. Cyberpunk. Steampunk. Space Opera. Bromance. Western. You can see where this is going. Preferably, pick something that is as unlike the story you've chosen as possible, because it'll force you to be creative instead of filling in the blanks.

You guessed it - write tab A in slot B. Hopefully, if they're different enough, having to fit the story into the genre/setting rules will mean things have to change - it stops being cinderella and turns into a story with cinderella-esque themes or tropes. 

Have fun.

 

Find a long piece of music or an album, preferably instrumentalist. Ideally, it has highs and lows - parts where the music is upbeat, parts where it's dark, sections of tension, melancholia, light relief. Classical music works well as do movie soundtracks (if you skip out any pop songs), or (my personal favourites) albums by Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre or Enigma.

Sit down, put the album on, and start writing whatever scene the music makes you think of. A tense, underworld exploration? A happy couple? A chaotic storm of dreams? Go with the music, shifting the tone and pace of the story to match as you listen.

If you're someone who types slowly, you may find you have only time for a sentence or two before the tone changes - that's okay. Treat it as an outline exercise, in that case - you can flesh out the sentence into a paragraph or so later.

 

This is a challenge akin to writing something that (might) work for a game story - it's shifting the character arcs onto the supporting characters, the characters who aren't the story focal point (protagonist).

Take three characters (you can use more, but it's harder).  One of these is the protagonist, the one making their own life, telling the story. Give them a goal.

The other two characters may help or hinder (they can do either, but if they're both helping or both hindering, they should do it in different ways). They also each have individual goals. These goals don't particularly mesh with your protagonist's, and they directly contradict each other.

Example: C is your protagonist. She's locked in a building and wants to get out (goal). G currently controls the building, and wants C to stay there to perform a task (goal). W starts out helping C because he (secretly) wants control of the building (goal).

Now, the trick is to create character arcs for G and W. Have them go through dramatic changes emotionally and as a person - think Hero's journey, though it doesn't have to be anything grand. So, create an emotional arc for G and another for W. Now you have to work out how to get there through C's actions. C is still the protagonist. It's just that C's actions are causing emotional arcs in other people. Remember The Hollywood Formula? - well, one of G and W is the hero, one is the antagonist. C (the actual protagonist) is the relationship character.

Now, either W or G has to be the 'hero' - this is the person that C will have a reconciliation with. In our example above, W is only using C to help him achieve his goal of taking over the building. Once he's done this, he betrays C and uses her in the same manner G was earlier. Near the end, however, W realises his mistake and apologises to C - they reconcile. So that makes W the hero, and G the antagonist.

You have your three goals, and your two arcs (your protagonist doesn't get an arc, they may or may not achieve their goal.). The arcs are a direct result of the protagonists actions and interactions with the characters. Now write the story.

 

A while ago I was downloading the remaining sondtrack for Portal 2, a game that's still on my list for game of the year. (The fact that I actually wanted the soundtrack to a game should tell you something of the production values and creativity of the team involved). I thought about the story, trying to determine what made it so much better than the typical video game fare. This was shortly after I'd listened to Writing Excuses' podcast on the Hollywood Formula, and approaching the issue from this angle showed something interesting

I should note that if you haven't already played Portal or Portal 2, this post assumes you know how the story goes, and there are major plot spoilers ahead. I'd strongly suggest that if you have any intention of playing it (and you should), play it before reading any further. It's well worth it, and one of the few games where experiencing the story is a vital component to the game.

 

 

I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

 

 

Think of the most trivial need you can. Someone wants a bucket of sand. A packet of chips. A left shoe. Something utterly mundane and petty.

Your task is now to write the scenario where that need is world-ending. They'd give everything they had for that shoe. And you have to show why. Why is that shoe suddenly so crucial? What terrible fate will befall without the protection of that packet of chips? What will they lose, for want of a bucket?

Go for comedy if you like - depending on the need you decided, there may be simply no way to suspend disbelief without absurdity. But make sure you communicate real need for this item, with real stakes.

 

No writing games this week - too frantic preparing for Paris. But I do have two great posts for you (okay, one's a podcast, but it's still a "post".)

One - on your author-voice(s) and your character's voice(s): what they are, how to find it (or cheat at it, if you're struggling), how to know you've got one, and how to protect it once you have one.

Two - a podcast on "the Hollywood Formula" over at Writing Excuses (a great running series about all manner of writing, especially spec. fic). Don't cring at the word "formula", this is actually a great breakdown of how the major emotional arc works between characters in a story, and it's a great tool for getting to the crux of creating an emotionally satisfying arc.

 

I've always found Campbell's Hero has One Thousand Faces somewhat inaccessible. The information's buried so far down in metaphor that I found it very difficult to apply, as a novelist. And Vogler's Hero's Journey's not much better. I did, however, come across this piece online the other day, which explores the same material but makes it somehow more digestable. It's a lengthy read, but worth it, if you're looking at story structure and character arcs and trying to make sense of your gut feelings about things.

The writing game's pretty simple, really. Take a story, either one that you've written, or a book you've read recently, and find the points of the journey, if you can. Now, not all stories follow the journey (though they can usually be shoehorned in if you try hard enough, just as any literature student). The point is to get practise at seeing the structures so you can internalise them.

 

I had a post, but Joomla decided to eat it, as it does every so often. And rewriting posts always strikes me like I'm repeating myself, I get impatient and stroppy. More than usual, I mean. I can't believe there's no "undo" function on the internet. But here goes.

The rundown is: I've been tweaking the plot of my novel for months, trying to get it to work. It kept feeling contrived and forced. Sometimes those 'tweaks' seemed to be major revisions, as in they'd require substantial rewriting of a lot of scenes. But I realised the other day, while thinking about le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, that I'd missed something major.

I wrote a while ago about keeping one thing sacred in your novel, and everything else being mutable. I'd forgotten that. There were aspects of my plot that I wrote in months ago as filler - they were "Until I think of something better" stand-ins. Trouble was, when I redesigned the story again and again, they hung on, until they'd worked their way into the central conceit. And I could no longer see that they didn't need to be there at all.

They were lame. They didn't work. And I couldn't make them work, because the novel didn't need to be 'tweaked'. It needed for me to burn the plot down to the ground and start again.

So I did. I threw out those aspects of the plot with a certain amount of glee. I thought about what it was about Earthsea that worked for me so much as a novel, and while i was looking and the shredded remains of my plot ideas, I saw it - the emotional centre of the novel. It felt right.

I still don't have much of a plotline. There are some major gaps and holes and things to wrangle out. But I feel like now I have the heart of what this story is.

It can be hard to see the rules we make for ourselves of what our stories are about. They turn into assumptions, like gravity and oxygene - invisible. We just walk on the ground and breathe air and don't even think about it. But they can kill a novel, if you don't look out for them.

 

I'm still on my nostalgia-kick with old TV series I used to watch. And when I struggled to find mobile signal in my own house to call the internet people and complain that my supposedly-super-fast internet was actually less than dialup speeds, it occured to me what a revolutionary and disruptive element the mobile phone was to TV and movies. 

Looking back even just on the ones I've watched recently, there are so many episodes where the entire crux of the story would have been wiped out if mobile phones had existed. Need to see if someone's okay? Need to warn the government of the impending anthrax attack? Need to call a bunch of people together to take down that gang? Need to call your boss to tell him your old arch nemesis is axe-murdering people again and intends to start with you?

In these episodes, much of the drama comes from the fact that the characters need to physically travel to a working telephone, or even carry the news in person. (I have entertaining images in my head of writer-rooms across Hollywood full of writers tearing out their hair that this one little contraption scuttled so many of their tried-and-true stories.)

So, the game - take a story (not necessarily yours) that either relies on a major component of technology (eg mobile phones, the internet, cars) or relies on said technology not existing. Rewrite said story where whatever it's relying upon is the opposite. So, a pre-mobile-phone detective story gets pulled forward to the early 2000's where phones were rampant. The high-tech cyber-crime story is plunged back 50 years into barely-pubescent-computers. What aspects of the story have to change to make this fit? And perhaps more interestingly, what can you still keep of the original tale?

Over the weekend my partner and I saw the last Harry Potter film. We watched it in 3D (which I hate, because it just gives me a headache with the occasional "hey, that thing is floating" moment, but the 2D screenings were all sold out. Hah.) which I must say is used very subtly in the film (so subtly, in fact, it doesn't add a damn thing to the proceedings and might as well not be there.) You're certainly not missing anything by watching in 2D, but the 3D is at least not used as a gimmick anymore.

I was interested to see my partner's response compared to mine: he hasn't read the books, missed some of the films and his memory isn't geared to remembering the minutae of detail necessary to connect Part 1 and Part 2. After asking for the cliffnotes of what happened in the preceeding three movies, we entered the theatre. And from here there will probably be SPOILERS, because my discussion rather depends on you knowing what I'm talking about. If you have somehow managed to avoid all knowledge of what happens at the end of the series and care about retaining that precious ignorance, by all means go read something else. Here.

 

We've all seen or read the great capers to steal the crown jewels / X-B/M/Trillion dollars / spy list / secret government underwear. Four million dollars through a traffic jam. They're intricately plotted, plothole-bending just-in-time capers that in all probabiliy would go horribly wrong in real life. But still great fun to watch.

What if the targeted booty was something you wouldn't ordinarily steal? Four million pairs of underpants. Everybody's left shoe. The world's plankton supplies. A nuclear power plant.

Two options here: either write the great heist where they're stealing something riduculous, like the aforementioned, or write the scene where Mr Brain explains to his henchmen why on earth they need it in the first place."Because it will destroy the world" is cheating. So is ransoming it all back for money. Use your imagination.

Bonus points if you combine them both into a heist story.

 

The subverted expectation is one of the major staples of writing techniques. It's how you produce twists at the end (or in the middle) of stories, comedy, horror, and those moments of all-is-lost-oh-wait-we're-saved, or nothing-can-stop-us-now-oh-crap-we're-screwed. There's a long form (story twist) where the reader thinks a particular way for whole chapters, and a short form (comedy, horror) where it's a brief set-up followed by a punch-line. They're slightly different in use and practise, but the basic technique is the same.

The trick is to first lead the reader down one path of thinking - but gently, so they don't realise they're being lead. If you tip your hand by laying it on too thick, the reader can see what's happening - they start looking for the catch. At the same time, they have to be prepared to accept the subversion or inversion when it comes, otherwise you'll jolt them right out the story while they go "huh? What the hell are you doing?" It's a delicate balance.

When the time is right, you pull the rug out from underneath them with a revelation that things are pretty much the opposite of what they seem. It's a trap! They have a cave troll! No, you're a traitorous bastard and I'm going to have your head cut off after all! The rug-pull should be sudden - what you're going for is the lurch they feel when what they thought was true suddenly isn't anymore. That disorientation, the 'ah-ha'. You won't get that if the reader knows what's happening beforehand. If they could have figured it out at any point along the last five pages, you're in trouble.

That's not to say you can't give the rug a few tugs now and then - in fact, in long-form variations it's a necessity, as part of making sure the reader is prepared for the revelation. It's called foreshadowing. But be careful when and how you do. Keep it subtle, keep it a good distance from the real revelation, and keep it in the opposite direction to what's really happening. That is, if someone is going to be revealed as a traitor, don't have them do something treasonous. Instead, have them perhaps quietly filch something, or tattle on someone else's crime. Something that foreshadows - without giving away - the fact that they're a nasty piece of work without showing the specifics.

The actual exercise is short-form subverted expectations. Pick one of either comedy or horror, whichever you feel like writing.

Horror

For horror, start with a situation that's, well, nice. Not boring, but pleasant or exciting. A picnic in a beautiful mansion. A new adorable fluffball of a puppy. Write the opening paragraphs setting this scene. Don't go overboard with the sweetness - remember, you have to lead them gently so they don't see it coming.

About three quarters of the way in, put in an alarm bell. One tiny, mostly-insignificant detail that says "everything is not okay, here". The mansion has an abandoned but warm teapot on the table for no reason. The puppy growls at a cat with a growl too deep for its body. But keep your characters unaware. They explain it away, rationalise it or become distracted by something else. Most of all, don't draw attention to your alarm bell. It needs to be there in the back of the reader's mind so the revelation makes sense, but if you let the reader stare at it too much, they'll see your rug-pull coming.

Write the last quarter, keeping with the happy, pleasant scene and then, in one move (one sentence if possible) turn the whole thing on its head. You need one event to happen that shows what was really happening all along. Don't just have the puppy viciously attack them and them slowly figure out it's a hellhound. Have it morph into Cerberus in front of them. Have the house shrink around them and inprison them in a cupboard. You can't afford to have your characters take a page to figure out what's going on (and therefore tell the reader) - it leeches all the drama from the twist. Remember, the rug pull has to be sudden. That said, it also has to be clear, or you'll frustrate your reader and leave them unsatisfied. There are stories with literary merit where you finish the story not knowing what was going on, but that's not what you're trying to do here. So - be clear, and be concise.

This may mean a lot of rewrites until you find exactly the right way to make that revelation. 

Comedy

Comedy is pretty much an inversion of the above, with one exception - no foreshadowing. You have to have all the ingredients there - you can't introduce anything new for the reveal, but they have to be placed in such a way that the reader doesn't put it together. You can't give anything away with this kind of comedy - it's all about the sudden relief.

Start with something, dark, terrible, scary, whatever. Keep it dark and scary and terrible right up until the last moment, and then make it ridiculous by bringing in something from left-field that makes the scene not-scary anymore. Cthulhu is rising, but discovers he now needs a walkerframe.  It has to be something non-obvious; having the Kraken beaten back by submarine missiles is obvious and not funny. Having it frightened off by a burly fish-and-chipper with a cleaver and a bucket of beer batter isn't obvious. Unless you telegraphed it beforehand. 

Once again, your punchline has to be concise (though that doesn't mean the story has to end there - just keep the moment of revelation as brief as possible) and clear.

 

I have a book that became a trilogy that became a series. Or a trilogy-of-trilogies. Though probably more a series, because I'll be switching protagonists. All of which is difficult and perhaps a little laughable, given I haven't actually written the first one yet. (Well, not a lot of it. I've had to pause to reinvent some world that I hadn't painted in because I didn't think I'd be using that bit. But I digress). Though if J. K. can have seven books in her head before her train reaches the station and she's penned a word, I don't see why I can't have nine before I've finished writing the first.

The thing is, the plotlines of a book, a trilogy and a series are different. Or not different per se - they still follow the same principles. The difficulty is in the layers. (Obligatory Shrek reference here.) Plot are like onions. Or like onions would be if they grew with layers twisted over on themselves so that the outside layer was also the third layer from the center, and if you peeled it then you'd also peel all the other layers because they were all connected, and if you dye one green, another one goes purple. So not really like onions. But I'll explain:

 

Point of view is an odd beast. So often, it feels, we choose the point of view of our stories out of whim or habit. It's selected before we've envisaged much of the story at all. But it's a powerful force in the story. Not only does it control what information is revealed and when, it shapes the bias and perception (and therefore the progression) of the whole story. For example:

Take a simple story you know well - Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Handsel and Gretel, etc. Iconic stories often work best for this exercise because they've already been pared down to their basic components, and the original story (and variations upon it) are well-ingrained in our memories; we don't have to stop and think about what happens next.

Look in the story for a minor character - someone who is entirely incidental to the story. They don't have to be in the official version,  - in fact, it's probably a good indication if they're not in every version, as if means they don't have a pivotal part.  The footman who carries the glass slipper all over the town following the prince, Red Riding Hood's mother, the Huntsman who butchered the deer instead of Snow White, Handsel and Gretel's new stepmother (or her sister).

Write the story from this person's point of view. It might help to jot down exactly how much of the original story this person can actually see. The footman might be at the ball, for example, and he may have noted the prince dancing with a beauty, but he knows nothing of her home life, her fairy godmother, her sisters or the prince's obsession with her. Instead, the story has to change to be about him, with the original going on in the background. What are his troubles, what does he worry about and hope for? What's his life, and how do the few scraps of the fairy tale fit into it.

More importantly - the ending has to change. Someone else's happily ever after isn't going to do much for him. So the real story is, how have the events of Cinderella changed his life?

Bonus points if you can change the ending, but still keep the fairy tale recognisable.

WIth thanks to Judy Bird for her suggestions on this exercise.

 

I have a book that I've been working on for about three years now. Probably closer to four. I wasn't really keeping track of drafts or versions, but best I can tell, it's on about version 7 or 8. Possibly twelve, if you count the attempts that were aborted before the end of chapter 1.

None of those versions ever made it to the end of draft 1. Many were written with completely different processes, but in each I could tell there was something fundamentally wrong with the book - not the writing, which is fixable, but the story, which is not.

I was getting rather discouraged with this - I had a plan, you see, to be writing full time. I'm a touch-typist and a trained student*: I can write quickly. When in the habit of it, I can write several thousand words a day, with time for exercise, general life and my day job. Put that into a routine and you have a draft in a few months. Add another few months for editing and polishing, and you have a book in four to six months. Combine that with the fact that these processes can be overlaid - I can plan one story while writing another and editing a third (I know this because I do it now), and I can have several books a year. 

That was The Plan. Roughly: self-publish several books a year, average not-very-many sales across all of them a month, and be able to write full time in five or six years at the current salary I get from my day job.

Taking three years for one book was throwing not just spanners, but hammers, screwdrivers, allen keys and a disgruntled plumber in the works. But this week, three important things happened for me and my plan - or rather, my disappointment in my plan.

 

 

I'm (re)drafting the beginning of a novel, and I keep coming across completely different stories I could be writing with the given setup. Totally different themes, outcomes, character arcs, all from this point. All I'd have to do, is make a different choice here, or here or here.

This works best with a largish writing group - at least eight people. You can do it by yourself, but it's a lot of work, and probably not as much fun.

First, come up with your starting situation. A character with some quirks, dreams and flaws. A situation he or she is in. A conflict.

Now, come up with a decision your character will make. A major decision or action - not icecream flavour, unless the other flavour is about to give her food poisoning. A plot point, basically - something that will change the course of the story, and even the emphasis - one way, it's a coming-of-age story about a girl with beans, the other it's a crime-solving mystery. Split your group - one half of the group takes one path, the other takes, well, the other.

Now, separately, decide where this choice has lead your hero/ine. What's the conflict now? You might have to plot a little along the way; it's doubtful that major life changing events crop up every five minutes. Again, a change that will alter the story (though it'll do so less significantly than the first one - still try for a major difference). Again, split your group, half each way. As both of the original groups have done this, you now have four story paths.

Continue making decisions and splitting until each 'group' consists of one person. That means each person has a collection of plot points and decisions to write a story about the same character from the same starting situation. 

Now go write. Everyone's working from the same character and the same starting point. But different plot decisions make the character journey totally different. The comparison by the end can be startling.

 

Inspired by an ex-colleague, I started up a GoodReads challenge not long ago. My goal is 40 books for the year - 30 seemed a paltry number, and 50 too high. It wasn't until later I realised that leaves me little over a week per book, and I have some Ayn Rand's sitting on my To Be Read list, not to mention several door-stop fantasy novels. 40 will definitely be pushing it. At any rate, the latest on the list was something I picked up in a first-book-in-trilogy-super-cheap book sale.

The Eleven Domains were forged in blood a thousand years ago. The blood is about to flow again.

Bramble is as wild as the animals she follows deep into the forest near her village. Her dark eyes betray her heritage - she's a Traveller, one of the despised original people of the Domains. And for as long as she can remember, she has wanted to take to the Road.

In Turvite, where ghosts drift along dark cobbled streets, Ash must leave his parents, and the Road, to begin an apprenticeship with the only person who will accept a Traveller - the scheming Doronit. But the gods who linger in the gloomy square have other plans for him...

From different ends of the Eleven Domains, death casts Bramble and Ash on journeys across valleys and mountains, and into the dark history of their ancestors.

Freeman has a richly imagined world - the book is impregnanted with a deep history and culture that, while romanticised and idealised rather than realistic, lends weight to an otherwise non-existent story. Unfortunately, her timescale errs on the dramatic-and-unrealistic side -  not only has the civilisation not developed at all in a thousand years (no science, no change in religion, politics or social values) they're still hanging on to the prejudice and wrongdoing that was engendered thirty generations ago. A thousand years is a long time for a people to sit stagnant on things like this, but these people act like the wars happened last Winter. It's an odd blend that just doesn't ring true, to me.

Her writing is clean, clear and evocative, and certainly the strongest element in her work. Despite the books other flaws, which would normally have resulted in a dog-eared bookmakr hanging out from one-third-in for the rest of eternity, her writing kept me interested enough to finish it to the end, even when I could clearly see there'd be no significant plot development for the rest of the book.

And there's one of the main problems - this isn't a trilogy, it's a novel in three parts. After the first plot-points, which occur a little later than you'd expect in a novel, nothing much happens but the following of those plot points. At least, nothing that coherently fits together to make an emotional arc or a story. It's interesting - things happen to people, they make decisions, and other things happen, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point. There's no answer to the character's starting states - nothing that shows how they've grown, their development, and the closure at the end seems shoehorned in at best.

There's no resolution at the end of this book. Their quests aren't remotely answered - in the case of some characters, it's not even clear what their journey will be yet. Which makes the book fundamentally unsatisfying, to me. I wanted a story, something that would finish what it began, at least in part. 

And while the characters themselves feel dimensional, they're difficult to tell apart. Bramble was the only character I could keep track of - all the male characters blended into one another in short order. This was not helped by the fact that Freeman would stop the whole story to give us the point of view of another, inconsequential character. For example - one character killed a would-be-pick-pocket in self-defence, and spent a good deal thinking about the consequences of that. We then jump to a three-page POV of the death scene from said pick-pocket's point of view, a tangent which does not serve the story and does not give us any information we needed to know - it doesn't even give us anything unexpected. This happens several times throughout the book, and I'm at a loss as to why these interludes are there. There is no useful information in there. These characters are not important - we can see they're not important, and seeing things from their viewpoint doesn't add anything. They distract, confuse and slow down the book.

To me, those are big flaws, things that run right to the bones of the book and should have been addressed in the first or second draft where they could have been fixed relatively easily. So it is, I think, a testament to the quality of Freeman's writing that I still finished the book with a reasonable sense of enjoyment. While I won't be purchasing the remainder - I've no wish to slog through another lot of not-much-happening before the plot reveals itself - I will have a look at any other series or books she brings out.

 

 

This is the exercise I originally wanted to write last week, before I got side-tracked by good ol' Bugs and his Pismo Beach. Travel and journeys has been on my mind in terms of story rather a lot, not only from my own recent experience but from scenes that I'm currently working on in my novel and shorts.

This one you can make up completely if you like, but I find it more entertaining and often more absurd and original if you start with your own experience and build. So - think of a journey you took where things didn't quite go to plan. Doesn't have to be a big journey - it could have been a walk to the shops, or your daily commute to work. It could even be walking to the other end of your house. But something unexpected cropped up, something that made your day just a little unusual. That's your starting point.

And then things get really weird.

Let your imagination play. Bring in aliens or mythical creatures if you want to, but often the most bizarre, dramatic and character-revealing trials can be perfectly mundane in origin.

 

I've blogged about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) quite a bit before. Dan Wells, author of I Am Not A Serial Killer, has adapted it to his own challenge, which I think is ideal.

He's termed it NaShoStoMo - National Short Story Month. And it's not particularly national - as far as I know, it's just him - but it's great practise for a writer. It's very simple: every day of the month, he writes a complete short story. They're tiny - a minimum of 200 words, but they can be longer. They must be complete, with a beginning, middle and end. Like NaNoWriMo, they don't necessarily have to be any good. The point is to practise the art of storytelling, rather than writing. They're different disciplines - one is about constructing sentences, the other is about constructing emotion and story - and you need both.

Now I'll admit, this isn't something that fits into my life right now - I have several projects on the go that need to take precedence. But I'll definitely be saving this idea for the future (probably in an adulterated form - 200 is a little short for me, I'd rather have at least 500 words.). I think it would be especially good if you're feeling blocked on unsure of what to write.

It doesn't have to be one story a day - if you're interested, but not a prolific writer or have a very busy schedule, make it two a week for ten weeks or something similar. Just like Nano, it's entire what you make out of it.