[Steven Lake]

I'm just curious of the other writers here in regards to their writing. I've been working on book 6 of my Earthfleet series (I'm looking to finish the entire first saga so that I can fully nit all 7 books together to ensure that the series flows and is cohesive) and noticed something interesting happen with my writing. I started out a couple weeks ago, fretting, grumbling, and more or less having a really bad time getting anything moving on the story. I fiddled, futzed, and in some places beat liberally with a literary stick, my story, hoping to get it moving.

I even did a little hack, slash, burn, and rebuild on my character list in order to get things moving, which did help a lot. But it still sorta puttered along, not really going anywhere. And then suddenly today it just all popped. I sat down in the afternoon after mulling over the story for most of the morning, began writing, and before I knew it I'd pounded out the better part of 5 chapters in one afternoon. And it wasn't blabbering nonsense. It was good story, good character building, dynamic, and flow, and so much more. It was like someone had opened the spillway and the story just came rushing out.

And then I thought back to my other stories, and remember that they all went sorta like that as well. I would struggle with characters (It is hugely important to get your chief characters settled early on as they do a lot to drive your story and plot) for a while, then the initial idea, the basic plot (sometimes I'd write with only a bare skeleton idea of what I wanted to do, and then let the story build itself from that) and finally, at some unspecified point in the story, it suddenly began to flow and evolved effortlessly after that.

I still had to put thought into what I was writing, but everything just connected, the story evolved, and it was more like I was writing history than something new or unique. Like I'd been there and I was simply dictating for the reader everything I had seen and experienced. I even began to get really excited as I'd write, as though I were reading the story for the very first time as just a reader, and less as a writer.

So, with that said, at what moment in your writing do you experience that magic moment where the story just begins to happen and it pours out of you like a flood? My magic moment is typically about 15-20% of the way into the story once all the basic introductions are done and you tip over the line from setup into the main story.