Panster Help: Moving Forward

Disaster (Photo credit: ★keaggy.com)

        Well, it is a little more than half-way through NaNoWriMo. If you chose to not write from an outline, you may be running out of ideas or running into dead ends. How do you keep moving forward and adding to your word count? Two ways are through cause/effect and worst-case scenarios.

        All the action in your story should be cause-and-effect.

You can use this principle in two ways when you don't know what to write next

        Think of what would logically follow from the last set-back. Did her boyfriend get kidnapped? What is in character for her? Maybe chase the captors, maybe go to her ex-boyfriend who is a detective, maybe lock herself in her room and cry. A quick hint: if you are having trouble moving forward, the last scene might not have ended with a big enough set-back. The great

er the set-back, the easier it usually is to decide what happens next

      While you are doing this technique, be thinking about worst-case scenarios. This goes back to the view-point character's scene goal. If you are stuck in your writing and using one of the two techniques just discussed, you may come up with a goal as you go along. This is fine. Once you know the goal, you can alter the scene so it ends in a set-back for your view-point character.