ScriptSuperhero.com

It doesn’t require Dr. Larry Shapiro to figure out why sometimes the hardest thing can be to figure out an ending to a good story: it is hard, and even the best fall victim.

Remember the Lord of the Rings trilogy movie and the “17 endings” that so many people complained about? Hey, even the book was kind of like that. Tolkein was a great writer, but he went into overkill on ending his best works. It happens because once a writer senses the end of a story coming up, there’s a strong urge to do the: “here’s how everyone turned out in the end” thing.

Another writer who is guilty of such “ending overkill” is John Irving. I mean, I loved the World According to Garp characters as much as anyone, but do we really need to know how Garp’s newborn son turns out? That’s where the movie was superior; the story’s over after Pooh shoots Garp dead on the gymnasium floor.

There are other ways to ruin endings to good stories; I may talk about some others in a different post sometime.

One of the best cures for writer’s block, other than leaving writing and going into selling truck accessories, is to kill someone off.

No, I don’t mean become a murderer in real life. I mean in your story, genius. This simple advice goes back at least to Lawrence Block. And he’s right.

Think about it. Your story is established and things are going along pretty well, but the story just has no juice, no jazz, no energy.

Kill someone off. It could be a supporting cast member, a villain, a family member… heck, even the main character works in a pinch.

Death opens up plenty of story possibilities. You have to show the grief process, plumb the prayers of the survivors, have a character figure out how and why the death occurred and who that death does to motivate the rest of the cast.

This one’s money in the bank: when you’re blocked, kill someone. Your story will be the better for it.

The biggest barrier to completing projects in writing is focus. In today’s high-tech world, there are plenty of more-entertaining and more-pleasant ways to spend time.

Whether its burning and listening to your music on an iPod, Web surfing, TV, videogames, fishing, hitting the greens with your Ping Golf equipment or even just spending time with your significant other, there’s always something you’d rather be doing than writing.

We’re all guilty of it, so let’s just be honest: writing is hard work and the best way never to finish anything is to let yourself get distracted. Of course, you’ll never get published that way. Trust me.

You know, everyone thinks they have at least one book in them. The only reason we don’t see most of them is that they never get written. It’s easy to say you’re a writer, or that you want to be, but if you don’t write every single day, if you’re not producing, it’s all a lot of hot air and ego. A pitcher never gets to the World Series if he doesn’t log in the practice hours and a writer never gets published or produced without a lot of hours putting words on paper.

It’s not that hard a concept to understand, and real writers get this. The main difference between all those aspiring James Pattersons and the real James Patterson isn’t so much the level of fame attained; after all, Patterson was unpublished once, too.

No, the difference is that he kept writing, kept finishing projects and kept at it until finally something he wrote broke through. Assuming you know how to form words into cogent stories, that’s the only difference. Practice.