Inside Creative Writing

What If You’re Not the Kind of Writer You Thought You’d Be?

sky [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/sky-1024x64.webp] WHAT IF YOU’RE NOT THE KIND OF WRITER YOU THOUGHT YOU’D BE? — a podcast episode — What if I’m not the kind of writer I thought I’d be? Many writers start with a fixed idea of the kind of stories they’re supposed to write, but creative growth often reveals a different voice or genre that feels more authentic. Embracing this shift isn’t failure; it’s part of discovering your true identity as a writer. What if You're Not the Kind of Writer You Thought You'd Be [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/what-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be-fi-1024x512.webp] [https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4d565c5c3a80d688d3505508fbfede7cc63481bccbd6f39e09fdf829077e121d?s=48&d=mm&r=r] Helping writers craft authentic, immersive stories. Find out more about us [https://insidecreativewriting.com/about-inside-creative-writing] here. Inside Creative Writing * Email this Page [?subject=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F&body=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] * Share on Pinterest [https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&description=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F&media=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F04%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be.webp] * Share on Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] * Share on Threads [https://www.threads.net/intent/post?text=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] Table Of Contents 1. Formatted and Edited Transcript * Expectations vs. Reality * * When Writing Takes a Turn * * Why Writing Takes So Long * * Writers Who Evolve * * The Trap of Early Success * * The Problem of the Platform * * Signs You Might Be Writing the Wrong Story * * Shiny Object Syndrome * * Wise Words * * Writing Challenge for the Week 2. Talk to Us! 3. Share This Resource What if the writer you thought you’d be isn’t the writer you actually are? This episode dives into one of the most important (but rarely discussed) challenges writers face: discovering that their creative voice may not match the genre, tone, or style they originally envisioned. Whether you’re feeling creatively stuck or wondering if a pivot is necessary, this conversation will help you listen to what your writing is trying to tell you. Key takeaways from this episode: * How to recognize the difference between resistance and authentic redirection * Why early success can trap you in a version of yourself that no longer fits * Practical tools to explore a shift in genre or voice without scrapping your work * How to use flow state and “guilty relief” to evaluate new story ideas * Encouragement from authors like George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, and Franz Kafka, who reinvented their work mid-career You don’t have to be the writer you set out to be. In fact, discovering who you really are on the page might be the most exciting part of the journey. Ready to go deeper? Explore the How to Write a Novel [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/] page or try the Story Rescue Checklist [https://insidecreativewriting.com/story-rescue-checklist/] to see if your current project needs a fresh look. Story Rescue Guide from Inside Creative Writing [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/story-rescue-guide-banner-2-1024x512.webp]https://insidecreativewriting.com/story-rescue-checklist FORMATTED AND EDITED TRANSCRIPT When you started writing, you probably had a clear idea of the kind of writer you were going to be. But what if you were wrong? And what if that’s actually a good thing? Let’s dive in. Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast [https://insidecreativewriting.com/inside-creative-writing-podcast/]. This is Brad Reed. I’m thrilled to be here with you again today. I want to talk about something that almost every writer struggles with at some point, but we don’t often say it out loud. We don’t often talk about it. And that thing is the question, what if I’m not the kind of writer I thought I was going to be? EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY When most of us start writing, we have this clear idea in our heads, right? We picture ourselves maybe writing sweeping fantasy sagas or gritty detective novels or maybe some deeply emotional literary fiction. We might even imagine ourselves sticking to a particular genre or a specific audience or a specific style. We tend to think we should be writing the type of work that we love to read [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/reading-like-a-writer/], and sometimes that is the case, but not always. Sometimes that love of a specific type of story is only the thing we need to start writing in order to find what we’re truly meant to write. Now the same thing happens to musicians and singers all the time. Some start out aiming for pop stardom but find their voice in folk or blues. Others might dream of being country stars, but they realize once they get started that their passion actually lies in indie rock or jazz or something like that. Even huge names like Taylor Swift pivoted dramatically during her career, which is still ongoing and still pivoting, right? Moving from country to pop to indie folk, all sorts of stuff. Over time, artists often need that first step into a familiar genre just to get started, only to realize that their true sound lives somewhere entirely different. Alanis Morissette is another great example of this. She started out as kind of a teen pop singer. She had some level of success with that, not nearly the success that she had when she shocked the world with Jagged Little Pill [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagged_Little_Pill], an album that is so far away from teen pop that I don’t think you could get much farther away. WHEN WRITING TAKES A TURN So writers experience this same thing. We step into writing thinking we’re one thing and we’re writing one kind of story, but the deeper we go, the more something else starts to emerge. And then somewhere along the way, what actually comes out when we sit down to write doesn’t really match that picture we had going in. The stories we’re drawn to feel different. The voice feels different. Sometimes the whole process feels different, especially different than what we thought it would be. When this happens, it can be really confusing and off-putting. It can feel like a failure. I mean, imagine somebody like Franz Kafka. He wrote the classic The Metamorphosis [https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Kafka_Metamorphosis.pdf]. He started out actually trying to write plays and never got far with them. They weren’t very good. But he tried, right? That’s where he started. You can go back and read through some of his journals and some of the writing that he did around that time, and he just saw himself as an absolute failure because he couldn’t write these plays. He wasn’t having the success he envisioned having. Frank Kafka The Metamorphosis [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/cockroach-1024x512.webp] But he switched it up. He went on to start writing short stories and novels, and the world of writing would be dramatically different without his unique blend of surrealism and existential dread that has inspired countless writers. I try to picture him in this tough spot where he’s not sure what he should be writing, and he’s down on himself. He had a terrible inner critic that just told him he was no good, that he would never succeed. And then he comes up with the story idea: I’m going to write a novel about a man who wakes up as essentially a giant cockroach. Probably didn’t feel like the most obvious next step for him as a writer. But fortunately for all of us, he followed that inclination and discovered his voice in that kind of writing. WHY WRITING TAKES SO LONG Those early attempts at writing are actually just the beginning of becoming who we really are as writers. It’s the beginning of a journey that can take years and even decades sometimes. We, as writers of novels, have really bitten off a lot to chew. And one reason this is so hard to see while it’s happening is because novel writing as an art form is very different from almost every other type of creative work. Take painting, for example. You could create dozens of paintings in a year, probably even more. You sketch, you paint, you get it out there, you get some feedback, you take that into account, and you iterate. You change your approach, you experiment with other things and see what the reaction is to that. songwriter [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/songwriter-1024x512.webp] If you’re a songwriter, you might write and record a song, play it for friends, perform it live, adjust it, grow from it. In fact, I read something the other day that said the Dire Straits song “I Want My MTV [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0],” a classic rock song, was written in just a few minutes while he was looking at a store display in the window of a bunch of televisions that had MTV on it. And the song poured out. We don’t get to do that as writers. Especially if we’re writing novels, the work is long-term. We don’t get that quick turnover where we can freely experiment with a bunch of different kinds of novels until we find what works for us. Even short films could be made relatively quickly and shared widely. Especially with today’s technology, you can make a home movie with your cell phone and a program on your computer and it’s up on YouTube. That can be in a matter of days. But a novel? A novel is slow. Painfully slow, even when it’s going fast. It’s a slow process, and it often takes months, if not years, just to get the first draft [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/] down. Then more months, if not years, to revise it [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-revise-and-edit-a-book/], polish the language, get it to shine. Then trying to get it out into the world, to get it published or find readers can take even more time. Even if you do find a publisher, once you’ve signed that contract, it can be years before the book ever comes out. It is a long, painfully slow process. There’s no instant feedback like there is in almost any other art form. Major motion pictures are maybe the one exception. But there’s not a lot of others where the timeframe to create our art is so very long. And without that fast feedback and that ability to kind of pivot from one thing to another and try a bunch of things, it’s harder to realize when you’re forcing yourself down a path that doesn’t actually fit you. It’s easy to stay committed to an idea of who you thought you were supposed to be, even when your writing itself is trying to pull you in a different direction. So it’s also important to remember that writers change over time because people change. I’m not the same person I was at 25, and I’m certainly not the person I was at 35. I’m not the person I was at 45, and I’m not going to tell you how old I am now, but it’s somewhere above 45. Your interests evolve. Your emotional range deepens. Your experience that you can draw from multiplies. Of course you’re a different person, a different writer as you go through your life. It would be really strange if your writing stayed exactly the same forever, so letting yourself grow and letting your stories grow with you is part of this process, part of this artistic journey that we’re on. generations of writers [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/generations-1024x512.webp] So the stories that you needed to tell five years ago aren’t necessarily the ones you need to tell today. I have a terrible habit of beginning stories and never finishing them because I lose that passion and that drive. And I always think when I set them aside, I’m going to get back to them someday. And when I go back to them, I think that’s not a story I want to tell. I’m a different person with different skill sets, different points of view than I was back then, and I don’t want it now. I may borrow pieces of it, but I take that as a sign that I am alive as a writer, paying attention and evolving as a writer. So instead of looking at those things as failures that I never went back and completed, I look at them as stepping stones on that path to the writer that I’m becoming. And the same is true of you. WRITERS WHO EVOLVE Some of the most iconic writers in the world have gone through massive shifts in their careers. Let’s start with a writer who’s going through some rough times right now, Neil Gaiman, but we’re going to talk about him anyway because he’s a great example of this. He started out writing comics, right? The Sandman [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-sandman-book-one-neil-gaiman/17327380?ean=9781779515179&next=t] series. Very successful with that. But he didn’t just keep cranking out comics. He moved into novels, writing books like American Gods [https://bookshop.org/p/books/american-gods-neil-gaiman/6433860?ean=9780062059888&next=t], children’s books like Coraline [https://bookshop.org/p/books/coraline-neil-gaiman/285105?ean=9780380807345&next=t]. He writes screenplays, poetry, nonfiction, essays. He refused to stay in one lane. He figured out what his writing was and then he didn’t just get stuck in that. He moved with that journey. Margaret Atwood is another one. Often we think of The Handmaid’s Tale [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-handmaid-s-tale-margaret-atwood/7333453?ean=9780385490818&next=t], that dystopian fiction, but she’s also written speculative fiction, historical novels, poetry, short stories. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-remains-of-the-day-kazuo-ishiguro/6713500?ean=9780679731726&next=t], which is kind of a delicate, restrained historical novel, and then he turned around and wrote Never Let Me Go [https://bookshop.org/p/books/never-let-me-go-twentieth-anniversary-edition-kazuo-ishiguro/5cc6723499403c91?ean=9798217008018&next=t], which is a dystopian sci-fi story about cloning and existential despair. I’m not sure you could get two more different directions from a single writer, yet he had the boldness and the curiosity to go there. Even outside of writing, look at someone like Picasso. He didn’t stay trapped in his blue period [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso%27s_Blue_Period]. He moved into cubism [https://www.pablopicasso.org/cubism.jsp], into surrealism [https://www.museepicassoparis.fr/en/picasso-and-surrealism], into whole new ways of seeing and expressing himself. And we’ve already talked about music, but we see it all the time in music. David Bowie, reinventing himself again and again. He didn’t just stay Ziggy Stardust for his entire career. ziggy stardust [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ziggy-stardust-1024x512.webp] These artists understood something vital that we can learn from. You don’t discover who you are creatively by deciding what that is ahead of time. You discover it by doing the work and letting that work change you. THE TRAP OF EARLY SUCCESS Now there’s a huge amount of pressure on writers, on any kind of artist really, but especially on writers. And I’m going to get to that in a moment. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Before we get into that, let’s talk about what I’m going to call early success. That doesn’t have to mean I wrote a bestseller or sold millions of copies. That could be whatever you determine success to be. That could be a couple hundred people bought my book [https://bradreedwrites.com/survival-fiction-crossing-cascadia] and gave me great reviews on Amazon. Maybe it was way more than that, maybe it was less. Maybe you wrote a book that your family loved and they raved about it, and not many other people were interested in it. But you still took that as a success. So whatever you define as early success, that can become a trap. When a first novel finds some success, even in a small way, there’s enormous pressure on us to keep delivering that same thing: the same genre, the same tone, the same expectations. We want to take that success, big or small, and build on it, because we put so much work into even getting that small piece of success. We don’t want to feel like we’re throwing that away by switching directions and doing something completely apart from it. That pressure can freeze us creatively. It can start to make us afraid to take risks, afraid of changing, afraid of examining ourselves for what kind of writer we’re becoming, and not just looking backwards to what kind of writer we’ve been. tentative writer [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/tentative-writer-1024x512.webp] Sometimes that slow growth is actually a gift. It gives you the freedom to explore different directions before an audience locks you into an identity that might not fit anymore. THE PROBLEM OF THE PLATFORM So let’s talk about what I was just getting lured into talking about a moment ago, which is what I’m going to call the problem of the platform. Today, this kind of patience with growing into who you are as a writer is harder than ever before. We, as writers, are told almost from the beginning that we need to “build a platform.” We need to define our brand. We need to pick a genre, we need to pick a tone, we need to pick a specific audience, and we need to market ourselves almost before pen even hits the page or before fingers hit the keyboard. We’re told we need to be thinking about marketability. We need to think about the hole in the market that we’re going to fill. We need to think about our voice and what it’s going to say in the world through whatever genre we choose. The truth is, early on we are still just becoming writers. We’re still discovering our voices, our stories, our emotional range. And if you lock yourself into a brand too soon, it’s going to feel suffocating. It can make you afraid to experiment. Honestly, it can make you afraid to change. Now I’ve fallen for this myself, which is why I’m so passionate about talking about it. And honestly, I’m still influenced by this as well. So really, this podcast is as much me talking to myself as it is me talking to you. I love road stories. Books, films, TV shows, anything with a road story where people have to kind of chuck their old life behind and get out in the world and travel in some way, discover new things. Those stories just resonate with me, and I actually really do love writing them. I’ve kind of started to define the writing that I do as road story novelist. But sometimes an idea pops into my head, a new idea, and it feels exciting. It feels interesting. It’s the kind of idea that has me walking around a little bit in a daze throughout my day, thinking about characters and settings and plot points, and it just consumes me. road closed [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/road-closed-1024x512.webp] There’s a part of me that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. That’s not a road story. That’s not what you do. You’re this other thing. And what I’ll do is I’ll start thinking, OK, you’re right. It’s not a road story, but maybe I can force it into being a road story. So I’ll play around with it, and I’ll move the plot around and the characters, and I’ll try to force it into this preconceived notion I have of me as a road story writer. And I either just destroy that story, or I just chuck it. I say, oh no, this isn’t the right story for me. It doesn’t fit what I’ve written before. Right now, I have the tiniest little bit of a platform. Microscopic. And the vast majority of writers out there, maybe you as well, have what we would call a microscopic platform. But we’ve worked hard for that, right? We’ve written for hours and hours and hours, and revised for hours and hours. We’ve sweat and bled for our art to get it out there in the world. Maybe we’ve found some fans, some people that appreciate our writing. We don’t want to walk away from that. We don’t want to chuck that. And we can easily talk ourselves into feeling like that’s what we’re doing, right? We’re taking everything we’ve worked for, whatever reputation we have, and we’re throwing it out. But I’m here to tell you, a tiny platform is just that. It’s tiny. It’s fluid. And the people who love you and love your writing will follow you wherever you lead them with the kind of writing that you want to evolve into. So we can afford to pivot if we need to. We can afford to follow those creative instincts. We can afford to let our early work be messy and experimental and wonderfully weird. Think back to Franz Kafka: “I think I’ll write a story about a man who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach.” We can be weird. Our little inner critics [https://insidecreativewriting.com/inside-creative-writing-podcast/when-characters-take-control/], those voices that are always telling us those negative things, they love to tell us things like, you’re too old to change. Even at 20 years old, 30 years old, we can feel that pressure to have everything figured out and be making a name for ourselves, as though we’ve been writing for 40 years. The truth is, life is long. I tell this to my students all the time, especially the seniors who are panicked about what they’re going to be. That’s the question we always ask seniors in high school. What are you going to do? Are you going to go to college? What are you going to study? What are you going to be? And there’s so much pressure around that. And I tell them, life is long. You’re going to be a lot of different things, and whatever you pick first is almost guaranteed to be the thing you’re not going to do the rest of your life. Especially in today’s world. life is long [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/life-is-long-1024x512.webp] And I think that’s true with writing too. Life is long, even if we’re getting older. A dude like me still has a lot of words to write. And so do you, whatever age you are. So you don’t have to define yourself forever based on your first or your second or your third project. Your best work often lies in the directions that you didn’t expect to go. And those stories that jump out of the blue, grab you by the throat, and say, you will write me. Especially, and I say that on purpose in kind of that aggressive way, because the best stories, the ones that really get a hold of us, are the ones that scare us a little bit. They make us a little nervous. They make us feel, oh, I don’t know if I can take that on. I don’t know if I should take that on. But they get a hold of us. They get in our skin and demand to be told. SIGNS YOU MIGHT BE WRITING THE WRONG STORY So I want to talk a little bit here because I may have you questioning. Thanks, Brad. I’m right in the middle of a story and now I’m not even sure that I should be going that direction because I’m having some doubts and the story’s not working out. Well, I want to help you with some tools here to kind of look into your natural instincts and see if you’re following that true writer in you or if you’re being misled by some of the pressures and resistance [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/writing-resistance/] that are out there. So if you’re not sure whether this applies to you, a few signs that you might be fighting your natural writing instinct. First of all, you dread working on the “official” project that you’re committed to, but your mind keeps wandering off to other ideas. Is that a sign that you’re writing the wrong thing? Maybe. Maybe. We’re going to come back to this in a little bit because we don’t want to confuse that with resistance. And we’ve talked before about resistance in this podcast, so I don’t want to go deeply into it other than to say that art, if we’re attempting art of any kind, then resistance shows up to try to keep us from doing that. Whether it’s distractions or self-doubt or anything, resistance rises up. So we can’t just say, boy, I’m having a hard time writing this book. We don’t want to take it just on that. It could be one of the pieces of evidence. What we really want to look at is something that we call flow state. When you’re writing your, I guess we’ll keep calling it the official project, the project that you’ve deemed the serious one that you’re working toward finishing, when you’re writing that, do you hit that flow state where all of a sudden time ceases to exist, everything else in the world ceases to exist, and you get in that zone where the words are just going onto the page, the ideas are popping off like fireworks, and you’re just having a great time writing the story? I’m not saying it has to be like that all the time, because writing is never like that all the time. But if we are finding that flow state at times when writing that story, it’s probably a good sign that we’re headed in a good direction with that story. But if we’re getting distracted and stuff because we’re struggling with the story and we can’t quite get into it, that may be a sign that it’s a story that we don’t need to be writing at that point. So let’s look at number two here. Another sign that might tell us we’re fighting our natural writing self, and again, these are all abstract. None of these are going to be black and white, clear answers. But when we look at them all together, they can tell us something important. loving a book [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/loving-a-book-1024x512.webp] If you feel kind of a strange sense of envy, or maybe longing is the better word, when you read certain types of stories that you think you’re not supposed to write. So you’re reading something outside of your zone that you’ve kind of defined yourself as a writer of, and you’re thinking, wow, I wish I could. I wish I could write something like this. Maybe it’s not even the quality of the writing so much as the type of story that it is. So let’s say that you are a fantasy writer and you’re reading sci-fi [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/how-to-write-science-fiction/], and you’re going, wow, I’m really jealous that this writer gets to write about spaceships. And I don’t write that genre, so I’m not going to be a good one to come up with examples, but you get what I’m saying, right? We have that little kind of envy, that oh, if I could write that, that would be awesome. Third, you’re excited when you’re brainstorming, but you’re drained when you’re actually drafting the story. Now this happens to me a lot, and I hate to even share this as a sign that we might be in the wrong place because it happens to me so much. I love the initial creation of a new story. I love coming up with characters [https://insidecreativewriting.com/character-development/] and names and plots and settings [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/write-immersive-scenes/] and thinking about the big picture. And then it’s time to put it on the page. I can lose that passion. I can lose that interest in it, and I start to feel like I’m obligated to write that story then, because I started it, not because it’s a story I’m truly invested in. So one of the things I’m working on in this area is recognizing that and not feeling like it’s a waste to throw all that brainstorming out and not write that story, but look at it as yet another step toward the story that I do want to write. That does pull that passion and interest and that will sustain that long, long, long drafting process. And then finally, if you’re feeling trapped by expectations. If you’re writing a story and you feel like there are expectations you’re trying to meet, either your own or expectations you’ve picked up from others. Maybe you’re comparing yourself to younger authors who’ve made it big already. Maybe you’re comparing yourself to writers who have an entire library of books they’ve written in a specific genre, who seem to know exactly who they are as writers. And we think we have to be that. I have to keep writing this genre. I have to keep writing this type of story because that’s what I need to be as one of these amazing writers with libraries of their own books that they’ve written. So if we’re feeling that sense of being trapped by expectations, that can be another one of those signs that we’re not writing a story that is authentic to who we are at that time. So if any of those sound familiar, you might not be writing the kind of work that’s most alive in you. But like I said, it can be really difficult to tell. So I want to dive deeper into one way that we can figure it out. It’s at least helped me, and maybe it will help you. SHINY OBJECT SYNDROME So we’re going to talk about shiny object syndrome. If you’ve heard of this before, then you know exactly what it is. If you haven’t heard of it before, I’ll bet you have it anyway. shiny object syndrome [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/shiny-object-1024x512.webp] Shiny object syndrome is the tendency to chase new ideas just because they seem easier or more exciting than the tough work of finishing what we’ve started. So we’re in that slog of actually writing the story, and it is a slog, even if we’re passionate about it and interested in it, it’s still hard work. And all of a sudden, these ideas start popping up. Or we see something on television, like, oh, that would make a good story, or something on the news. Or you read a book that inspires this new thought, this new direction that you might have taken that book, and you think, oh, there’s this other story idea that maybe I’m meant to write that. That’s shiny object syndrome, and it’s really just a form of resistance. It’s trying to pull us away from the work that we’re doing. But sometimes, that shiny object can be the thing that you’re supposed to be writing. So how do we tell the difference? It’s all about not just fear, but the type of fear. So go with me on this and see if this resonates with you. Resistance [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/writing-resistance/]—and when I talk about resistance, I’m talking about you’re writing the book you were meant to write, and this is just the natural difficulty that comes up in getting it down on paper—resistance often feels shallow and frantic. It’s about the fear of doing the hard work, the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough. So you’re in a story that you’re passionate about and you’re writing it, but you have this resistance that’s making it difficult because I have a fear that I’m not doing the story justice, or I have a fear that if I finish it, I’m going to get it out in the world and people aren’t going to like it. I’m going to fail. I’m not going to be good enough. That resistance feels shallow and kind of frantic. But the voice that leads you toward your true writing self feels different. It still, at least initially, feels like a kind of fear, but it’s more of a little nagging fear, more of a persistent kind of quiet fear. It’s not about escaping hard work. It’s not about making things easier. It’s not this shiny object like, oh, if I go write this, then that’s going to be fun and I don’t have to write this other thing anymore. It’s about feeling drawn in, pulled, or invited into something deeper, even when it scares you. And maybe especially if it scares you, if it feels more challenging. So if you’re writing a story now and you’re having difficulty with it, look at that shiny object and say, is that going to be easier or harder than what I’m writing now? If you’re saying that’s going to be easier and I can relax and just write that thing and it’s going to be more fun, that’s probably shiny object syndrome. But if you look at that and you go, oh wow, that would be a real challenge. That would be something new and different for me that I’d really have to work at. It’s hard to do because you’re already exhausted from what you’re trying to do. But if it’s that kind of fear, then that’s a really strong sign that that’s the story you should actually be writing. So the key here is honesty. Are you trying to run away from difficulty? If so, then that’s resistance. And let’s face it, writing books is hard. Even if you are writing the perfect story for you, if there is such a thing. Or are you feeling an honest pull toward something that’s more alive inside you? That’s the real writer in you trying to tell you where to go next. OK, one other trick here. When you think about the new idea, like the shiny object one, do you feel what I’m going to call guilty relief? Like you’re relieved that you don’t have to keep challenging yourself on your current project? Or that feeling of yeah, I know how to write that, it’s going to be so much easier. Or do you feel kind of a deep, thrilling terror? Right? Fear. Oh, can I do that? Can I actually pull that off? If it’s guilt-driven relief, it’s probably resistance. If it’s scary and exciting, it might be your real creative self trying to speak to you. So a key to this is don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t chuck the story you’re working on right now and jump off to that shiny thing because it got your attention. Give yourself time. Give yourself space to listen carefully before making a decision. But some things that you can do; we can experiment a bit. We can take little trials into pivoting. Not everything has to be a full-blown book. It could just be an opening of a book. It could be a chapter of a book. We could play with some of these ideas and see if it feels like that authentic place that we want to go. You can do things like write short pieces [https://insidecreativewriting.com/creative-writing-tools/five-minute-writing-prompts/] in different genres or voices just to see what excites you. Write an opening. Write a chapter. Write a short story in this genre or this style that’s kind of pulling at you, just to see what happens. What does it feel like? Does it feel like it’s challenging you? Is it getting those pistons to fire, getting that passion to bubble up? create a cover [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/create-a-cover-1024x512.webp] Here’s one that’s actually worked well for me, and I kind of just stumbled into it because I was playing with a graphic design piece of software, and I thought, well, I’m going to make a book cover. So one of the things you can do is actually design a cover for a book outside of your expected genre and slap your name on it and just look at it. Ponder it for a while. Have it up on your computer or wherever it is and just glance at it every once in a while and see if it’s pulling at you. Is it inviting you to actually want to invest in writing a book like that? Some people have luck with writing a fake back cover blurb. So you’re not doing the cover now, we’re doing the back cover, and we’re writing out how would somebody describe this story that I want to write? What does that feel like? What does that look like to you? Is it pulling you into that story? Another good place to look is back at your past writing. Really look, scene by scene. Are there scenes in some of the stories you’ve written before, maybe they’re scenes, maybe they’re just moments, maybe they’re characters or character dynamics, where you really felt alive doing that kind of writing? You felt challenged doing that kind of writing? That can be that little muse inside you pulling you toward a different kind of story to tell. Let’s say you’ve written a long literary fiction piece, but it had a few little action-adventure kind of scenes in there. And you remember writing those, and how you felt alive and it felt challenging, trying to put it together, and you just really connected with those parts. That might be that little inner voice saying, hey, we want to write some action-adventure stuff. We want to go challenge ourselves in that direction. If you do discover something new that you want to try, and I would bet that in our writing careers we all will at some point or another, you don’t have to announce a big rebrand. You don’t have to change your website around. You don’t have to send out a social media post talking about hey everybody, now I’m this kind of writer. You don’t have to justify that shift to anyone. You’re an artist. As writers, we are artists. And we follow our muse. I keep going back to that. We follow our muse, or that authentic voice that we have in us. We follow our excitement to where it leads. So give yourself permission to be curious about what your writing is trying to teach you. In fact, I recently heard from a listener, and I love that he reached out with this story because it meant so much to me and helped inspire this episode, in fact, but he started drafting what he said was going to be a smut story. A smutty story. Which, right, more power to you. But he said once he started actually writing, the characters in it really deepened, and their relationships became more layered, more complex, and it quit being a smut story. He’s still in the process of it, so he’s not sure where it’s going yet, it doesn’t sound like. But it’s changing. He’s following where that story, where his writer voice wants it to go. So it’s kind of pivoting into what sounds like a quiet, character-driven novel about self-discovery and emotional connection. So he hadn’t set out to write that kind of book, but the work led him there. That voice inside led him there by what he was excited about writing, and what he felt challenged to write. And he was bold enough to follow, which is huge. Huge. That’s the kind of creative discovery that only happens when we stay open to what our writing wants to become. WISE WORDS All right, let’s look at some wise words here, because I don’t want you to just hear it from me. We’re going to tap into a couple of authors here and see their take on this. So George Saunders, one of the most creative, self-challenging authors there is, he wrote Lincoln in the Bardo [https://bookshop.org/p/books/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders/7381254?ean=9780812985405&next=t]. Actually, not that recently, I guess, but a while ago. Lincoln in the Bardo is one of the most creative books I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend the audiobook version of it because it is produced so well with some great voice actors. I’ve never read a book quite like it, and just a really bold creative take on writing that I’m sure probably scared him a bit to do. He probably went into that with a lot of fear, but a lot of excitement as well. So anyway, what George Saunders says here is, “The best work emerges when we stop trying to write what we think we should and start writing what we’re curious about.” Oh, that’s huge. Start writing what we’re curious about. If we have all the answers and all the knowledge, why are we writing it, right? Start writing what we’re curious about. Love that. And then Terry Tempest Williams [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Tempest_Williams] says this: “Writing is a process of discovery. You never know what you might find or where it might lead you.” This is a great question that comes from that. Is your writing a process of discovery? Is my writing a process of discovery? Well, in some ways, yes. I’m discovering a story. But am I challenging myself to discover more of what I’m capable of writing? More of what I’m interested in writing about? And discovering what fears I have about writing that I can push through and find even better writing on the other side? WRITING CHALLENGE FOR THE WEEK So let’s get into our writing challenge for this week. This week, I want to challenge you to try something just for yourself. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Write about 500 words. This isn’t homework, so shorter, longer, it’s your choice. But I would suggest about 500 words in a genre or style that you either kind of secretly love, or you’re at least curious about. You’ve had the little fleeting thought, it might be fun to write something like that someday. Give yourself license to pursue that a little bit, even in a very short 500 words or so. Pursue it because it’s not you. It doesn’t have to be a serious attempt. It doesn’t have to be good. You don’t have to show it to anybody when you’re done. But just give yourself license to play and see if you discover something about who you are as a writer and what kind of stories maybe that writer inside you wants to tell. Need some inspiration? Check out our Five Minute Writing Prompts [https://insidecreativewriting.com/creative-writing-tools/five-minute-writing-prompts/]! If you have an experience with that that you want to share, I would love, love, love to hear from you about that. You can leave a comment below about how this writing challenge went for you. You can also comment about the podcast itself, this episode. Did you like it? Was it helpful? Do you disagree with it? Do you have another take on it? I would love to hear all of that good stuff and we can talk about it there in the comments. Before we wrap up, I want to circle back to where we started. Those artists that we talked about earlier. So imagine if David Bowie had stayed Ziggy Stardust forever. Imagine what the world misses out on. Or imagine if Margaret Atwood thought dystopian fiction was the only thing she was allowed to write. Or imagine if Alanis Morissette wasn’t bold enough to give up her pop music for Jagged Little Pill, which I still listen to today, and it still freaking rocks. We would have missed out on so much. So our job isn’t to guess ahead of time what we’re supposed to be. Our job is to stay curious. To stay open. To keep moving forward even when the path surprises us. Maybe especially when the path surprises us. So you don’t become the writer that you thought you would be. We become the writers that we actually are, and we just don’t know it yet. We’re discovering those writers as we go. And that’s a much more interesting journey than trying to figure it out at the beginning and never varying from it. So thanks for being here today. I’d love to hear from you if this resonated. You can shoot me an email at brad.reed@insidecreativewriting.com [brad.reed@insidecreativewriting.com] if you don’t want to leave a comment on the page and share your thoughts. I’d love to hear that. If you’re struggling with your current project right now and you’re curious if it’s trying to tell you that it’s not the right project to be working on, it might just be that your story has gotten off track a bit. So I’ve put together something that I’m really proud of. It’s called the Story Rescue Checklist [https://insidecreativewriting.com/story-rescue-checklist/], and what it does is it helps you see if there’s something structurally wrong with your story that’s causing it to not work well or causing you frustrations, to help you fix that before you give up on it and decide that you need to go chase after that shiny object that you just thought about. So that story might be the right story to be writing, but it may just be missing some vital pieces. You can pick it up for free by going here [https://insidecreativewriting.com/story-rescue-checklist/] and I’d love to send you that. So until next time, keep writing. Because that is, of course, the best way to get better as a writer, by writing. Keep exploring. Keep pushing yourself. Keep finding those things to write about that scare you just a little bit. And I will look forward to seeing you back here again soon. Thanks for listening. Interested in more podcasts about How to Write a Novel? [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/] TALK TO US! We’d love to hear from you! If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion, or just want to tell us about your work-in-progress, give us a shout! info@insidecreativewriting.com [info@insidecreativewriting.com] SHARE THIS RESOURCE * Email this Page [?subject=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F&body=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] * Share on Pinterest [https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&description=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F&media=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F04%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be.webp] * Share on Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] * Share on Threads [https://www.threads.net/intent/post?text=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F] * Share on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fwhat-if-youre-not-the-kind-of-writer-you-thought-youd-be%2F&title=What%20If%20You%27re%20Not%20the%20Kind%20of%20Writer%20You%20Thought%20You%27d%20Be%3F] RELATED RESOURCES: * why do you write [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/why-do-you-write-webp-300x300.webp]https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/why-do-you-write/ * what to do if you have writers block [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/what-to-do-if-you-have-writers-block-webp-300x300.webp]https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/what-to-do-if-you-have-writers-block/ * Plan your novel with index cards [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Plan-Your-Novel-with-Index-Cards-300x300.webp]https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/plan-your-novel-with-index-cards/

1. maj 2025 - 1 h 0 min

Plan Your Novel with Index Cards!

sky [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/sky-1024x64.webp] PLAN YOUR NOVEL WITH INDEX CARDS! BORROWING A SCREENWRITER’S TOOL — a podcast episode — How can I use index cards to plot a novel? The index card method helps novelists visualize and organize their story by dividing it into key turning points across a four-row layout, one row per story act. Each card represents a single scene, allowing writers to pace their novel, identify structural weaknesses, and rearrange plot points easily before drafting. plan your novel with index cards [https://insidecreativewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/plan-your-novel-with-index-cards-fi-1024x512.webp] [https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4d565c5c3a80d688d3505508fbfede7cc63481bccbd6f39e09fdf829077e121d?s=48&d=mm&r=r] Helping writers craft authentic, immersive stories. Find out more about us [https://insidecreativewriting.com/about-inside-creative-writing] here. Inside Creative Writing * Email this Page [?subject=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21&body=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F] * Share on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21%20—%20https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F] * Share on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F&title=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21] * Share on Pinterest [https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F&description=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21&media=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F04%2FPlan-Your-Novel-with-Index-Cards.webp] * Share on Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F&title=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21] * Share on Threads [https://www.threads.net/intent/post?text=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F] * Share on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Finsidecreativewriting.com%2Fhow-to-write-a-novel%2Fplan-your-novel-with-index-cards%2F&title=Plan%20Your%20Novel%20with%20Index%20Cards%21] Table Of Contents 1. Formatted and Edited Transcript * Why the Index Card Method Works * * Structure as Creative Freedom * * Podcast Episodes on Story Structure * * What Is the Index Card Method? * * Act One: Setup and First Turning Point * * Act Two: The Midpoint Shift * * End of Act Two: The All Is Lost Moment * * Act Three: The Resolution * * Building Out the Full Card Layout * * Structure Inspires Creativity * * Adapting the Index Card Method for Novelists * * Setting Up the Card System * * Optional: Color Coding * * Laying Out the Cards and Playing with Story * * When Structure Sparks New Creativity * * Using the Index Card Method During Drafting * * Wise Words About Structure * * Weekly Challenge: Reverse Engineering with Index Cards * * Final Thoughts and Resources 2. Talk to Us! 3. Share This Resource When writing a novel, it’s easy to get lost in the fog of ideas and endless possibilities. That’s where index card plotting comes in. In this episode, we explore a screenwriting method that translates perfectly to fiction: using index cards to build out your novel’s structure. This hands-on, visual approach helps writers of all styles, plotters and pantsers alike, get a clear view of their story’s pacing, major turning points, and emotional beats. Whether you’re stuck in the messy middle or just getting started, index card plotting offers clarity and momentum. Key takeaways include: * How the classic 40-card layout is used by screenwriters, and how novelists can adapt it * The four key turning points every story needs: inciting incident, midpoint, all-is-lost moment, and resolution * How to physically map out your novel for better pacing and structure * Tips for customizing the system to suit your writing style * How the index card method reduces overwhelm and unlocks creativity If you’ve ever felt stuck or unsure of your novel’s trajectory, this is a powerful method to get you moving. For deeper story guidance, check out our full How to Write a Novel [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel] guide and listen to How to Plot a Book [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/how-to-plot-a-book/] and Claymation and Story Structure. [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/what-is-an-inciting-incident/] FORMATTED AND EDITED TRANSCRIPT Today, we’re going to steal from the screenwriting world to hack our story plotting. We’re going to explore a card game of sorts and figure out your story. Welcome back to Inside Creative Writing, where we help you craft authentic immersive stories one technique at a time. I’m your host, Brad Reed, and today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite tools, borrowed, or maybe stolen, from screenwriting: the index card method. WHY THE INDEX CARD METHOD WORKS Now, if you’ve studied screenwriting at all, you’ll probably be familiar with this tried and true method of plotting and pacing a film. But if you haven’t, this could revolutionize the way that you plan and plot your story. So, with a little tweaking, we can take it from the screenwriting world and make it work for novels and even short stories as well. This is one of those techniques that feels weirdly old school, which I kind of love. But trust me, it works. It’s flexible, it’s tactile, and it helps you see your story in a different way. And the best part? You don’t have to be a plotter to use it. Even if you’re more of a discovery writer, index cards can bring just enough structure to keep your novel from wandering off into the… STRUCTURE AS CREATIVE FREEDOM Before we dive in though, I want to pause for a second. Because if you’re not yet sold on the idea that structure matters, you’re not alone. A lot of writers resist it. I used to resist structure, too. I thought structure would cage my creativity. What I’ve learned is that structure actually frees it. I’ve seen this play out in my creative writing classes over and over again. If I tell the students to write a story about anything they want, I get nothing but blank stares. They don’t know where to start. There are just too many possibilities. But if I give them limitations, they leap into storytelling. So something like: write a scene where a character must leave a voicemail for someone they haven’t spoken to in over a decade. They only have 60 seconds before the recording cuts off. They can’t say why they’re calling until the final sentence. Now notice how many rules there are to that, or how much structure there is to that prompt, but what it does is it focuses the creative mind and gets it moving. We start asking questions about that situation, about that prompt. It starts suggesting possibilities and even characters and types of conflict that we could write about because we’ve given it that structure. PODCAST EPISODES ON STORY STRUCTURE If you’re on the fence about using structure in your writing, I highly recommend checking out a couple of past episodes of this podcast before or after listening to this one. The first one is called How to Plot a Book: The Secret to Strong Story Structure [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/how-to-plot-a-book/]. That episode discusses something called the “somebody wanted but so” and “somebody needed but so” frameworks for creating a focused, cause-effect driven story structure. You also might check out How to Plan a Book with the Snowflake Method [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/how-to-plan-a-book/]. This is an interview with Randy Ingermanson about breaking a novel down into manageable planning steps. And then finally, maybe my favorite one on this topic is called Claymation in Story Structure [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/what-is-an-inciting-incident/]. It uses claymation as a metaphor to explain why underlying structure supports creative flexibility without limiting your expression. Check those out if you’re still not quite sold on structure or want some different angles to look at it from; they’ll help you figure out your own approach. WHAT IS THE INDEX CARD METHOD? So let’s get back into today’s technique. What is the index card method? Let’s talk first about how screenwriters actually use the index card method and why it’s often based, at least for them, on a 40-card layout. They start with 40 index cards. Now, in the world of screenwriting, structure is everything. A typical screenplay runs about 100 to 110 pages long and it follows a three-act structure almost religiously. To plan that structure, many writers use 40 index cards. What they do is lay them out in four rows of 10 cards each. The first row, the first 10 cards, is for Act One. The second row of 10 cards is for the beginning of Act Two up to what we call the midpoint. The third row is from the midpoint to the end of Act Two. And the last 10 cards are for Act Three. So first row: Act One. Second and third rows: Act Two, with a midpoint in there. And fourth row: Act Three. ACT ONE: SETUP AND FIRST TURNING POINT Let’s look at Act One, cards one through ten. This is the setup, basically. You’re introducing the protagonist, their world, their central problem. Each one of these cards represents a scene, a major scene, that sets up the world and lays the foundation for the story. Somewhere around card 8 or 9 (this is flexible) we hit what we call the first major turning point. This is the moment where the story really begins and the protagonist commits to a new path. We’ve talked about this as the inciting incident. It’s not always specifically the inciting incident, but it often is. Let’s look at some examples because that always helps. THE HUNGER GAMES In The Hunger Games, if we went to card 8 or 9 in our layout, we’d see that’s about when Katniss volunteers as tribute. Up until that point, she’s just surviving. We’re getting to know her and her world and the conflict. And then suddenly, when she volunteers as tribute, she can’t turn back. HARRY POTTER Let’s look at Harry Potter, too. I know there’s lots of feels about the writer of Harry Potter. I’m still using it as a source because it’s such a shared story. I’m not endorsing anything here, just using it as a common story that we’re all familiar with. The turning point in the first Harry Potter book is when Harry boards the Hogwarts Express. Up until that moment, we’re just seeing his ordinary world. He’s under the stairs. But then he enters the magical world, where the story really takes off. That would be about card 8 or 9 in that first row of the card system. You could go through and look at each of those scenes leading up to that and see how they’re building up to that moment. Maybe it’s card 10. Maybe it’s card 5. It’s flexible. But 8 or 9 is that sweet spot. I’ve got a couple other examples here. If you’re curious or need some more help on this, shoot me an email at brad.reed@insidecreativewriting.com and I can send you more. ACT TWO: THE MIDPOINT SHIFT So let’s go ahead and look at Act Two now. We know that each card represents a scene in the story, or in this case, still talking about film, a scene in the movie that builds up to the end of Act One, where something big happens. Some major change throws the story into motion. Now we’re in Act Two, the beginning of our second row of cards. This is the heart of the story. This is where we start to build tension. In screenwriting, Act Two is often split into two halves. We start to see the character work through this new conflict, this new world they’ve been thrown into. But we’re building up to something called the midpoint, which happens at the end of that second row. The midpoint fundamentally shifts the direction of the story. Maybe it’s a big reveal, maybe it’s some kind of reversal, a sudden new goal, something gets flipped on its head about midway through the story. When we first start planning these systems, we’re really only concerned with figuring out those main turning points. I want to start by knowing: what is my inciting incident? What is my midpoint? And then we’ll get to the third and fourth ones here in just a moment. MIDPOINT IN THE HUNGER GAMES Let’s go back to The Hunger Games. So we’re looking at that row of 40 cards, or that second row of 10 cards. At the end of that second row, Katniss scores a major win with her alliance and gains a moment of safety. There’s almost a false sense of control right in the middle where the reader goes, “OK, we’re going to make it.” And then the game makers raise the stakes again. The rules of the game change. If you know that story, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can go to the book or screenplay, find that moment, and it’s right about smack dab in the middle of the story. The stakes have changed. Katniss now has to understand the games in a new way. MIDPOINT IN HARRY POTTER What does it look like in Harry Potter? In Harry Potter, it goes from kind of school adventures; there’s a lot of fun in the beginning of Act Two, right? Because we’re getting to go to magic school, getting to know the characters. But suddenly, about in the middle, something pivots. We discover something really dark is going on at Hogwarts. And Harry is now in investigation mode. He’s not just learning the system. Now he’s trying to save the place. So that’s our second row: Act Two begins and ends with a fundamental shift at the midpoint. END OF ACT TWO: THE ALL IS LOST MOMENT Now, how does the third row end? The third row ends with something often called the second turning point. It always feels like the third one to me, because that midpoint is definitely a turning point. But you may hear it referred to as the second turning point or the end of Act Two turning point. This is where things fall apart. You’ll often hear this referred to in screenwriting as the All Is Lost moment. And I almost hesitate to teach people about this because it ruins a lot of movies. Once you’re aware of this plot point and are looking for it, you can see it clearly in almost every film ever made. There are exceptions, of course, but that All Is Lost moment is everywhere. Everything has gone wrong. There’s no way the protagonist is going to succeed. We think: we’re done. ALL IS LOST IN THE HUNGER GAMES In The Hunger Games, Rue dies. That moment where Rue dies, we see Katniss emotionally break apart. Her illusion of staying morally separate from the games is shattered. It really changes Katniss from a survivor to a rebel. But there’s that moment before she decides to be a rebel when we think as the viewer: this is it. There’s no way she’s going to overcome this. ALL IS LOST IN HARRY POTTER In Harry Potter, the All Is Lost moment comes when Harry, Ron, and Hermione go through the trap door and are separated from the teachers. Suddenly they’re on their own. The adults can’t help anymore. They’re facing what seems like an impossible challenge without backup. Now, there are stronger All Is Lost moments in film than this one, but again, we’re using a familiar story. A COMEDY EXAMPLE: ELF Let me see if I can find one more. Yeah, actually, I didn’t even think of it until right now. But in Elf, right? A comedy movie. Does a comedy movie have an All Is Lost moment? Absolutely. Almost every movie does. That moment when Elf (Will Ferrell) is looking over the side of that bridge into the river. He’s lost everything. He’s lost his family. He’s lost everything he cared about. He’s looking over the side of that bridge, and we get the sense, just for a moment, that he might jump. Elf is thinking about suicide in that moment. The script doesn’t say that or anything, he doesn’t say, “Oh, should I jump?” but we get that feeling: “Oh my gosh, all is lost here. What does he have left to live for?” That is an excellent example of an All Is Lost moment in a comedy. ACT THREE: THE RESOLUTION So that’s the end of Act Two. We reach that All Is Lost moment. That would be the third card you want to start with, right? You want to start with the inciting event, then know your midpoint, and then define what that All Is Lost moment looks like. And then finally, Act Three, or that final row of cards, is the resolution. It usually starts with some big change. Something unexpected happens. The rules change. Or there’s a sudden event. In Elf, we’ll use that as an example again, Santa Claus comes down out of the sky. Will Ferrell’s character sees Santa Claus in the sleigh, and suddenly there’s life again. There’s hope again. So Act Three starts with some kind of “Oh my gosh, maybe all isn’t lost. Maybe the protagonist can confront their biggest challenge and still reach the resolution we’re hoping for.” The final 10 cards focus on payoff, transformation, and ultimately closure. That last card of Act Three is: How does this story end? How does it resolve? BUILDING OUT THE FULL CARD LAYOUT It’s a little hard to do in audio format, but hopefully you’re able to picture what that looks like. To use the card system, you come up with those major turning points first. And I know I’m going over this again, but it’s so important: * The first row ends with the inciting incident. * The second row ends with the midpoint, the fundamental shift in the story. * The third row ends with the All Is Lost moment. * And the final row ends with the resolution. Once you know those, what you do is go back and backfill the other cards, the scenes that build up to each of those points. Why use 10 cards per row? The reason that’s so helpful is it keeps your pacing balanced. It makes sure the buildup in each act feels right. No part of the story feels rushed. No part feels too slow or like it’s plodding along. Now is there flexibility? Of course. But this system helps you stay aware of how you’re pushing against the expected structure. If your first act is pretty long, you’ll know it, and you can make decisions from there about whether you want to take that risk or whether to cut it down. STRUCTURE INSPIRES CREATIVITY This is not about being rigid. It feels very rigid, just like we talked about at the beginning, some rigidity actually inspires creativity. It gives us problems to solve, and we have to come up with unique plots and unique characters to make it all work. It always feels like putting together a puzzle to me. A puzzle where you don’t have the box to look at, so you don’t even know what the picture is that you’re trying to build. This system is about knowing what needs to happen in each section of your story so you don’t drift off or kind of lose steam. When screenwriters lay out these cards, they’re writing scenes. They’re thinking in bits of action, sometimes called beats, for how to build up to those main points. And each card focuses clarity. So basically, on each card, you’re just writing a single sentence about what happens in that scene. If a scene doesn’t earn its place, it doesn’t get a card. I have used this system for many stories that I’ve written, and it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t really matter. If you’re putting something on a card and you realize, “Oh my gosh, am I really going to waste one of my 10 cards (or whatever number I’m working with) on this scene?” No. Maybe that scene gets cut. Maybe it gets combined with another scene, and I realize I can accomplish this in a single scene. Sometimes you’ll find scenes that need to be expanded. When you write it on your card, you’re like, “That’s not really a scene, that’s like a second of dialogue or action.” You need to figure out how to expand it to make the pacing and trajectory of the story work. ADAPTING THE INDEX CARD METHOD FOR NOVELISTS So that’s basically how it works for screenwriters. Now, how does this work for novelists? For novelists, this level of focus is gold. Even if your book is 300 or 400 pages long, you can still use this approach to make sure that the major movements of your story are working together and that the pacing feels purposeful. Even if it takes a lot longer to get to these points, the pacing is still going to be there. Instead of jumping into just, “I’m going to write an 80,000-word novel,” and jumping in blind, you can start with a simple stack of cards, each one summarizing a single scene or turning point. The visual and tactile layout helps you understand your story at a glance. And what’s really fun is that you can carry these cards around with you and work on your story in little moments almost anywhere. If you’re chilling in a coffee shop, you can pull out your stack of cards, lay them out on the table, rearrange them, examine your story, brainstorm some linking scenes if you’re still working on that. Mix them up and see if your story works in a different order. And really watch your story take shape in a hundred different ways that isn’t rewriting pages and pages of text. This part of the process: I love it. It is so much fun to create this card system and just start playing with your story until that big picture clicks in and you have that “aha” moment. Like, there it is. There’s my story. Even if it’s a rough idea, now you have a road map for how to get there. SETTING UP THE CARD SYSTEM So how do you set this up for a novel? I always start with 40 to sometimes 60 blank index cards. Now, you can do this digitally, but I find that paper—real index cards—works super well for me. I punch holes in the corners of them so I can put one of those binder rings through it. That way, I can take them anywhere, undo the ring, and lay them out to play with them. The classic way to do this is to put up a big cork board on the wall and use pushpins or tape them to a whiteboard or something like that. But I really like the portability of cards on a ring. That’s up to you. What you’re going to do is write one sentence on each card describing what happens in that scene. Don’t overthink it. Just the main beat of that scene. I love using the Somebody Wanted But So as the scene description. If you’re not familiar with why that’s helpful, we’ve done a couple of different podcasts on it. I’ll put links at the website again for those episodes so you can get familiar with that. By using the Somebody Wanted But So, it ensures that the scene has some kind of conflict, some kind of stakes. Something is happening in that scene that justifies its place among your cards. One card. One scene. OPTIONAL: COLOR CODING Optionally, you could color-code the cards. Some people use: * Blue for major plot events—those cards at the end of each act * Green for character development scenes * Yellow for subplots There are all sorts of ways to color coordinate. Don’t worry too much about that when you’re first figuring the system out. Just use plain cards. As you get more comfortable, you’ll customize it for how your brain understands story. You’ve got to make up your own rules for this card game. LAYING OUT THE CARDS AND PLAYING WITH STORY Basically, what you do is lay the cards out on a table or pin them to a wall—something like that, and you start creating. The world is at your fingertips here. Anything is possible. Major changes can be invented, cut, rearranged in just a few movements of your hand, rather than editing pages and pages of text that you’ve poured your soul into. In fact, when I start writing a new novel or story, I’ll just sit down with some index cards and write scene ideas out. “It would be cool if this happened. It would be cool if that happened.” I don’t care at that point if they’re turning points or resolutions. Doesn’t matter. I just get them on cards so I can lay them out and start playing around, seeing how the story might come together. What this gives you is a bird’s eye view of your novel. It helps you immediately notice pacing issues, dead spots, missing scenes, where you need to invent some more plot, or places where one thread disappears for too long. You don’t need to end up with exactly 10 cards per row like a screenwriter would. That would be more like a novella at that length. But it will help you see if you’ve got an overloaded first act, or if Act Two is super thin. Even if you’re using 15 or 20 cards per row, you’ll be able to see it at a glance. If one row is way bigger or smaller than the others, that’s a red flag. “Oh, I’ve got work to do here.” WHEN STRUCTURE SPARKS NEW CREATIVITY And what’s fun about that is when you realize, “Oh, my second row is really short,” it drives you into that new place of creativity. You start inventing new plot ideas you never thought of. New conflicts, new directions, sometimes even new characters come to life and walk into your story because you realize, “I’ve got the space and the need to flesh this out some more.” It goes right back to what we talked about earlier: limitations drive creativity. It’s an incredibly powerful concept to understand. Why does this work so well? Because it forces clarity and flexibility at the same time. It gives you clarity because if you can’t summarize a scene in one sentence, that scene probably isn’t doing enough. “Joe goes to the store” is probably not a scene that needs to make it into the novel, right? Maybe we need to flesh that out. But it’s also flexible because it’s so easy to shuffle cards around or change them out. It’s no big deal to throw away an index card, grab a new one, write a new scene idea, and play with it. You’re not deleting 2,000 words, you’re just moving a little card around. It also helps with pacing. With cause and effect. You can see how your scenes connect together, and you can see the emotional rhythm of your story—not just what happens, but how it feels. I love being able to lay my story out in these cards and “read” it just by walking through the beats and scenes in a few minutes. USING THE INDEX CARD METHOD DURING DRAFTING What I’ve found is that this system isn’t just helpful for plotting and getting ready for a rough draft, it actually helps me while I’m drafting. My card system becomes my rough draft roadmap. Once I’m actually driving that road, things change. That’s no big deal. I add a new card, shift things around, make sure the story stays intact. Maybe I’m writing my midpoint and I hate it; it’s just not working. I can stop at that point, write a new midpoint, reshuffle some cards, create new ones, and get my story back together. WISE WORDS ABOUT STRUCTURE Let’s look at some wise words today, because structure is definitely talked about among many writers. The first is from James Scott Bell, author of Plot & Structure. He says: > “Structure is not a prison, but the skeleton that gives shape and strength to your story.” I love that. It’s basically the same concept I used in the episode on Claymation [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/what-is-an-inciting-incident/], how the armature of a claymation character can work as a metaphor for the kind of structure we build into story. Here’s another from Stephen King. Now, Stephen King is famous for being kind of anti-structure. If you’ve read his book On Writing, which is fantastic, he really hammers that idea of not starting with a plot. But here’s what he says about structure: > “I don’t start with a plan. But once I have something down, I step back and look for structure. If it’s not there, it doesn’t work.” So even Stephen King, this well-known proponent of starting without a plan, says at some point he stops and makes sure he’s naturally built structure in. If it’s not there, he rewrites. You could almost think of it like building a house versus putting up a tent. Building a house, you start with a plan. You start with a foundation and skeletal structure, then build. Stephen King’s approach is more like pitching a tent. You lay it all out on the ground—no structure—and then you prop it up with the poles. You give it structure after it’s already been spread out. That’s the way Stephen King approaches it. He just gets into writing, makes a mess on the page, and then he goes back and props it up with the structure that it needs. Really, either way works. It’s whatever system works best for you. WEEKLY CHALLENGE: REVERSE ENGINEERING WITH INDEX CARDS So, for our weekly challenge: this one’s going to be a little bit different. The challenge could be something as simple as starting to write some cards for a story. But what I want to do instead is build off our recent episode called Reading Like a Writer, where we talked about learning deep craft elements by really analyzing stories. So here’s the challenge: consider creating a set of index cards for one of your favorite example novels. One of those three or so novels you go back to again and again for inspiration. Go through that novel, or you could do this with a film, and actually create the index cards that show the structure. For each scene (sometimes that’s each chapter, but not always), write down what’s happening. What is the main movement or beat of that part of the story? When you’re done, lay those cards out. See if it shows a three-act structure, or maybe something else. Then notice how differently you see that novel now, once you can see the skeleton underneath it. If you do this, I’d love for you to share that experience in the comments over at Inside Creative Writing. Just look up this podcast episode on the website and you’ll see the comment section at the bottom of that page. I’d love to talk about it with you there. FINAL THOUGHTS AND RESOURCES If you’re writing a novel and you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or just tired of rereading the same scenes over and over without knowing where it’s all going—try the index card method. Grab some cards. Lay out your story. Give yourself permission to play. If you’re looking for more help on structuring your novel, definitely go back and listen to the episodes I mentioned earlier. They’ll be linked on the website. They’ll walk you through what story structure is really about and why it’s so important. Even if you hate outlining, this method can be really, really fun. I hope you’ll also check out the full How to Write a Novel [https://insidecreativewriting.com/how-to-write-a-novel/] guide over at insidecreativewriting.com. It walks you through every stage, from the idea to draft to revision, the whole thing. And I do want to plug one thing that I just built this week over on the website: Five Minute Writing Prompts [https://insidecreativewriting.com/creative-writing-tools/five-minute-writing-prompts/]. It’s an automated little program you’ll find right on the site. You click a button and it randomly gives you a five-minute writing prompt. These aren’t your usual prompts. They’re really specific to the kind of work we do here at Inside Creative Writing. They lean into some of the concepts we talked about in this episode. I use them myself when I don’t feel like writing or don’t feel creative. I’ll pop one up, write for five minutes, and it gets the wheels turning. They’re great for warming up, but also for reimagining a scene or trying something from a new angle. So if that sounds interesting, head over to the site, search for “Five Minute Writing Prompts,” and try it out. You can even suggest a prompt, if you want to. That would be awesome. Until next time, keep writing, keep experimenting, and remember: the best way to improve as a writer is, of course, by writing. I’m off to get some words on the page, or maybe some words on some index cards, and I hope you are, too! Thanks for listening. TALK TO US! We’d love to hear from you! 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16. apr. 2025 - 1 h 0 min

Inside Creative Writing

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