“Once you have a story rolling… how do you keep going and finish? How do you find a good stopping point, so you don’t forget what you are wanting to say, yet can pick up where you left off with good momentum?”
One of the best tips I came across somewhere was to stop writing each day while you still know what is coming next. Don’t completely drain the brain. Since I don’t create a detailed outline of my stories before I write and I am hearing everything for the first time as I write it, it’s sometimes hard to stop since I’m really curious to know where the story is going. But it makes a huge difference for me. Even though I stop writing, my mind keeps doing it’s thing and gets all the pieces ready for the next time I write.
When I am not writing, I spend very little time consciously thinking about where the story is going. I am always reading and listening, and occasionally come across something that seems related to the story. I just kind of tuck it away in my head and add it to the collection of “stuff” my ‘story-creator’ has to work with. For example, while writing Disbelief I spent a lot of time reading declassified documents about some of the stories issues and talking with people who were connected with those issues. I was rarely looking for anything specific, but just adding to the “stuff” pile, helping my mind learn to live in the world those issues were alive in.
The down-side of that process is that I spend a lot of time consciously reading and unconsciously processing a lot of things I sometimes have some very strong feelings about, often against. The world of the story becomes a real world for me. The characters and their issues seem as real as those in my world outside of my books. But, I guess the up-side of that is that I never actually “leave” the story and have to find out how to start again.
As long as I don’t some day end up completely losing track of which world is really “real”, this seems to work for me.
