Randall Floyd

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Why you shouldn’t write a spineless story

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Or, why every single story or book you write must have a spine.

Steven Pressfield wrote a great article on why everybody needs to figure out their story’s spine.  Go ahead and read it here.  Now that you’ve read it I think you’re ready to read the rest of this post.

Like Pressfield said, your story spine is an essential building block to your story.

If you read my blog post on the basic units of every story you’ll notice that I’d said the same thing, and for good reason.

I just didn’t call it the story spine.

Each story has to have three things: a beginning and middle and end. These three aspects of your story of our literally your story’s backbone.  I’ll come back to this in a minute.

Figure out your story’s spine

Think about your story, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.  Think about its beginning, its middle, and its end.  Now summarize each section into a single sentence.  I’m not going to let you use more than one sentence per section.  In fact, the shorter the sentence the more effective this will be for you.

So, let me try this again.  Take a look at each one of your sections.  Once you’ve done that, come up with three sentences.  Limit each sentence to seven words and no more.

This might be a little tough. Just humor me on this one.

Steven Pressfield gave a couple of examples, so if you’re looking for a place to start, start with those.  Just for fun here’s a couple more:

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief

  1. Boy discovers he’s a demigod
  2. Boy tries to stop godly civil war
  3. Boy stops war; clears his name

Finding Nemo

  1. Father loses son
  2. Father tries to find son
  3. Father finds son

The Martian

  1. Man is stuck on Mars
  2. Man/NASA try to get him home
  3. Man comes home

Once you have your three sentences, write them down somewhere.  Better yet, put them at the very top of your manuscript.

Never forget these three sentences.

Why your story spine matters

I told you I was going to get back to this.  Like I said, your story spine is literally your story’s backbone.

You can also think of your story spine as a roadmap.  If you know the three basic parts of your story then you’ll never get lost in your writing. If you’re stuck in the weeds, all you have to do is remember your story spine.

I know it’s helped me in the past.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been writing I and can’t seem to figure out where the story is going.  Frustrated I would go back to my story spine and remember what I need to be working towards at that point in my story.  Every single time, it helped me get back on the right track.

So, if you’re in the middle of your story, if you’re just starting out, or if you’re finished, make sure that you know what your story’s spine is.

If you have a scene that doesn’t help move your story to where it needs to go, then you know what to do to fix it. All you have to do is change the scene a little bit until it moves back towards your story’s spine.

Better yet, like Steven Pressfield said, with your spine all setup, “[you’re] setting yourself up to succeed and not to fail.”

My cure for writer’s block

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I used to think I suffered from writer’s block. That was before I understood what writer’s block actually was.

Now, I know for sure that I suffer from it. It plagues me at least once a week.

Fortunately, I found the cure for it.

I’m not going to tell you that I go and stand in front of the mirror, look myself in the eyes, and have a conversation with my reflection that sounds something like this:

“You’re amazing … you can do it! I believe in you.”

I tried that, and it didn’t work.

I’m also not going to tell you to write more until something good comes out. While that may eventually work, I think it’s a waste of time, a waste of words, and a waste of motivation to get things done.

What I’ve discovered is a four-step process that works every single time.

But more on that later.

First, just to understand why these four

steps actually work, I think it’s important to actually look at why writer’s block happens in the first place.

WRITER’S BLOCK IS REALLY JUST A SYMPTOM OF SOMETHING BIGGER, SOMETHING MORE NEFARIOUS.

First I’m actually not 100% sure the something bigger is actually the least bit nefarious. It’s just that nefarious is one of my all-time favorite words, and I haven’t been able to put it into a blog article for a while.

Its time had come.

Every single writer, at some point, has experienced writer’s block in some way, shape, or manner. You may have heard from a writer that they don’t believe writer’s block exists. Well, that person is lying … probably.

The fact is, they just call writer’s block something else.

The other fact is that writer’s block ALWAYS comes from one of two things.

The first thing is easy to deal with, so I knock that off my list first: distractions.

Distractions come in lots of ways, and from lots of sources. These distractions by themselves are not bad. But when they all decide, at exactly the same time, that they want to try and get your attention, writing becomes amazingly difficult.

It can get overwhelming … but don’t despair, you can overcome these things. You just need to do two things.

  1. Pick a time where you can write without having to talk to anyone. For me, this means getting up at 5 in the morning.
  2. Pop in your earbuds and turn on some good, old-fashioned music. It can’t be any music – no lyrics, and nothing that makes you sleepy. If you’re curious what I listen to, go here. This is my Spotify playlist – it’s movie and video game soundtracks.

The second reason for writer’s block is much bigger, and it’s usually more difficult to deal with. I call it getting lost.

That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Writer’s block happens when you lose track of where your story is going.

Perhaps you went down a plot rabbit hole, and now you can’t figure out how to get your story back on track. Maybe you just finished an anecdote, but don’t know how to transition it back to your main point. Maybe you forgot why you put the anecdote in your story in the first place.

I don’t know. There’s any number of reasons you get lost.

Fortunately for you, all you need is a map.

YOU CAN SYSTEMATICALLY REMOVE WRITER’S BLOCK FROM THE EQUATION.

Now we’re back to that four-step process I mentioned at the beginning, but then conveniently pushed off to the end of this post.

Now I must warn you, once you know these steps, you’re never going to have to deal with writer’s block again. Well, that’s not true. But here are the steps anyway.

  1. Take the day off from writing. Don’t think about writing. Spend time with your family, your dog, the sauna … whatever. Just get yourself out of the situation.
  2. The next day, map out your story, fiction or nonfiction. Figure out where you’re going. If you’re writing fiction, figure out the big scenes that excited you in the first place. If you’re writing nonfiction, remember what your big idea was in the first place.
  3. Make your map – plan your destinations. Once you figure out where you’re going, now you can plan out how to get there. Jot down some notes about how your character is going to go from point A to point B.
  4. Start writing. I’d recommend that you write the big scenes first. Then you can write out the less-important scenes you mapped out. Feel free to do it the other way around. It doesn’t matter to me – just start writing again.

IT’S TIME TO PUNCH WRITER’S BLOCK IN THE FACE.

I can’t tell you how long it will take to map things out. I can tell you, however, that once you get it done, your bout with writer’s block will be over … for the time being.

Writer’s block likes to feed on authors who don’t have a direction in their writing. It’s not all that different from those distractions I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Fortunately, you can systematically eliminate your writer’s block at any given time if you follow these four steps.

Now go out there and start writing again.