Sorry I could not help, but you have quite the novel approach.

It's ok, but I wonder what you mean by novel approach? That I start multiple projects (though not at the same time fo course) and never get around to continue them? Well, that could be considered a novel approach, but is also an apporach that won't get me anywhere so I'd like to change that. If you mean instead that I just do not edit whatever I write chapter by chapter, it's because I think that I'll edit when (more like if in my case) I'll finish...

I know these plots, I know these characters, I know these lines.

Detached professional who does dirty jobs, then unavoidably their conscience gets the upper hand.
Indie contractor (can be a villain) making demands to overwhelming authority.
Rebel being rebellious and amusing authority, in a good way.
Oh noes, what if the teacher/guards/police/news/president lied?

Now this is an interesting case. It's cliché (insane mages are, there's just no way around it), but it makes sense for a victim of propaganda to repeat propaganda, so this line is okay.

Good and bad predictability

David Mamet once went on a famous rant, the gist of which is this: Cliché situations are okay. What's not okay are plots whose direction can be predicted or at least mapped out in advance based on the reader's media consumption experience.

There's an important distinction here: for the reader to care about what happens in the book/movie/game whatever, they must understand the in-world consequences of what happens. Mamet again: What he's talking about here is show-don't-tell, but I want to highlight another point: when Jim fails to assassinate the prime minister in the next scene, the viewer should understand the consequences and be appropriately distraught. The in-world setting should be communicated.

But not the plot. There's a YOOGE difference between realizing that Alice the Asshole being promoted over Bob the Brave means Bob won't be able to pay for his mom's medical care (if the realization comes without Bob saying "oh noes, now I can't pay for my mom's medical care", it's exactly how things should be), and realizing it means Bob will get his promotion at the end of the movie and Alice will suffer an embarrassing incident and relegated to serving burgers (this is obviously a nope). Look at DystopianYA for an example of what to avoid (and I don't mean just these specific lines, but the whole situation where you read a line and see where the plot is going).

What I'm saying is, make your plot unpredictable in a good way. Even a toss-up between two outcomes is bad if said outcomes are cliché. Yes, sometimes the outcomes seem complementary (if one doesn't happen, the other must logically happen) and both are bad. Try to write a third option or scrap it. The reader should be always remapping projections and remain emotionally invested. A good bad example is the "love triangle" in Legend of Korra: who of these two guys will Korra end up with? Duh, the hot one, of course, how is that even a question. So by the time the gotcha happened (she romances a girl), I had long since stopped giving a damn about the character's love life.

And on the other hand, there's George Martin and his amusement park rides. George Martin is crazy: he thinks that if a fanfiction writer correctly guesses his plot, they can sue him for copyright, so he kept (I stopped following the books; maybe HBO producers keep him on a leash now) rewriting scenes they successfully predicted. So, because fans were writing what they wanted to see (dramatically satisfying), and there is a lot of them, in a large number of cases Martin was relegated to options which aren't dramatically satisfying. The result is a crappy lolrandom plot which is completely useless to speculate about outside of metadiscussions ("oh, an actor of a dead character showed up with matching facial hair at a social event"). So don't overdo the randomness, either. Yep, writing is hard.

What if the readers predict one or more of your plot twists? That's okay, realistic character motivation is your friend here. Good books are rereadable. As long as characters have explicable (not necessarily sane or rational) motives, instead of regular uncertainty you'll have dreaded anticipation. The good examples here are Primordia and Resonance. If you figure out early why travelling to Metropol is a profoundly bad idea, the player character still has a very good excuse to not realize it so that the player doesn't go "oh this is stupid how can anyone be so dumb that's it I quit". In Resonance, the four player characters have good motivations, but they're working at cross-purposes so bad stuff happens.
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Magic

Magic has weird effects on [un]predictability. Basically, you have to choose one of two ways to portray it: utilitarian magic, with laws the characters know or can figure out, or mysteriously poetic magic. People often say they prefer the second variant, but writing mysteriously poetic stuff is immensely difficult: anything which falls short becomes an ass-pull which easily ruins the book. A girl in a text adventure game who carries around her dead brother's last letter and can fold it into origami shapes and then the world is ending and she's on an runway and she folds a paper airplane which becomes a fighter jet, or killing fantasy Hitler Inglorious Basterds-style, but by splicing in L'Arrivée d'un train which becomes a real train, is illogical but dramatically satisfying in a way wishing really hard and shitting out a fireball isn't. You can't really quantify gathering willpower, blood purity, the hardness of a wish, the strength of oracular wifi, or for that matter skill with a sword and have it be in any way dramatically satisfying. Any conflict should be resolvable by adventure game procedure calls. A Witcher-III-style swordfight, no matter how exciting in the game, is not appropriate for a book. A MI-style insult fight is. Here's a passable swordfight:
hero and villain meet in a burning building
villain: oh hi, look what I have here [burns proof of hero's claim to the throne]
hero: fight! [they fight, hero is losing]
hero: you know what, I have friends and an army and I don't need that stinking proof [presses the advantage, disarms villain]
villain: lol, that's what I've been saying all along
hero: oh shit, you're right [loses concentration, gets killed]

The utilitarian way to make magic satisfying is to write up some rules so that readers can make predictions. Double- and triple-check the in-world effects of magic. Fantasy writers often borrow simplistic supernatural concepts from the real world (in which they are dumb shit, subject to belief in belief) and fail to reinvent them for the magical world (where they are very much real and have consequences). The afterlife, souls, wishful thinking, fortune-telling, sin, evil races (orcs, demons), morality in general. Western people who say they believe in an afterlife still have a very secular picture of it, which is why they cry at funerals; the attitude to death wouldn't be remotely the same if people could actually contact and visit the afterlife. If your world has a magical origin and weird physics, run it by actual scientists.

A good bad example is a certain book (not giving this shit google hits) in which the world is (supposedly, behind the scenes) a living picture and that's why it doesn't have volcanoes and obsidian (no seismic activity in pictures). SAY WHAT? It has mountains, valleys, oceans, rivers, a whole lot of other minerals generated through allegedly verboten physical processes from, yes, seismic activity to fucking FUSION. Can't anyone draw a motherfucking volcano? There's one on the cover of Dianetics for fuck's sake! And nothing is done about it. No one paints new pictures or cleans up old ones or anything, it's just a pretentious detail for the author to rub one off. Holy hell what a terrible book.

As a positive example, in one of my works, there are many small planetoids floating in 3d space, and each of them has Earthlike gravity and what looks like a RL Sun visible in the sky — so, physically impossible. Turns out (it's an explicitly high fantasy work) the world was magically shattered, and each shard floating in ether kept the original force of gravity and the original sky (like, when you break a green bottle, each shard is equally green). Why? It makes for a good setting to tell exactly the type of story I want to tell (high fantasy, cosmic scale, cultural sameness, but travel is dangerous and distances matter), AND the protagonist can assemble it back together.

The same goes for technology. The hay baler is a complex industrial machine, but tobacco is just an imported weed. If someone tells you off for having faux-medieval wizards smoke "historically inaccurate" tobacco, kick them in the privates over TCP/IP. But NO bales of hay. No likening things to bales of hay. Is the world permastuck in the faux Middle Ages? Why, what makes it different from the real world? How does that thing which makes it different influence the faux-medieval setup?

edit: TBC for char limit

Quadratic wizards

So, concerning mages persecuted as a public menace by a faux-medieval government (ranting, because people have found it helpful). No one has written or read Leviathan in a faux-medieval land. When a duke snaps, villages burn too. The modern nation-state is based on synergetic strength in numbers. There's no social contract in the Middle Ages between a king and the populace. Mark Zuckerberg can't beat up a navy seal, but a knight is worth, like, 50 peasants. Knights are well fed and have arms and armor, peasants are undernourished and only have the iconic pitchforks.

When magic is injected into the world, it engenders an upheaval of the existing social order. A mage is a real-life Randian hero, objectively -- not just circumstantially -- more powerful than a mundane person. People in power are pissed off because they now have tough competition. People not in power are pissed off because not having magic (unlike not having food) is an insurmountable stranglehold on the dream of building a civic society.

If mages are popping up completely at random with powers and whatnot, some become folk heroes, others pledge loyalty to the crown, and still others prop themselves up as local tyrants, with every social group potentially having exponentially powered support. It can actually be a push toward democracy, because it's pretty hard to subjugate a majority group when said group produces a proportionally large number of super-individuals. Are people born magical? It can degenerate into an oppressive child-stealing magocracy. Do talented mages need to be taught? There's a whole lot of possibilities how teaching arrangements might work. Is talent a thing at all, or can anyone be taught? If it's the latter, it's like all the modern revolutions bundled into one.

The world should make sense. The best book on fantasy writing is probably this RPG sourcebook. I don't mean you should copy the D&D world -- it's an example of how a setting is designed around its playable rules and ultimately the spectrum of stories people want to tell that a single ruleset can simultaneously support. Single-author fiction only allows for messing around with probabilities; the making sense requirement is never lifted. Here's an article on and one on [url=http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Fiends_%283.5e_Sourcebook%29/Morality_and_Fiends#There_is_no_Salvation_or_Redemption_in_D.26D]sin.
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Storytelling

Here's some advice from Chris Avellone: (Re: video games and stories thread: immediately after in the interview he says story in an RPG is secondary to "having a cool experience". This is of course a bad choice of words, because what's secondary is the plot rails, and the "cool experience" IS the story. But I digress.)

This ALSO applies to writing [awesome] adventure fiction. The reader's brain should always be working. Design a scene like you would in a game or movie script, with plot/setting revealed through offhandedly mentioned scene details. Especially in a book, you can actually get away with omitting key details. E.g. my book starts in what is described as a stereotypical faux-medieval tavern. Then two anachronistically dressed people talk about the good old days. (Maybe the writer just sucks at describing fantasy garments.) Then a church service. Zing! Turns out the service is held in a former hangar made of corrugated steel. Unlike tabletop RPGs, where everyone needs to be on the same page (page XX), these sorts of zingers are actually fair game. The criterion here is that no matter whether the mystery is posed to the reader, the characters, or both, the revelation should not detract from the central matter which is the characters' eventual fate (more below).

Don't make the backstory simplisic / exhaustible / reducible to a single issue. Good writing >implies rich history (but in ways other than rattling off fancy names Lin Carter style, and sometimes without said backstory having been designed or written).
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Mattering matters

The sole guiding light in fiction writing is that nothing whatsoever in the book should make the reader feel bad about spending time reading it (or fiction in general) and caring about the characters. If the twist makes it so that the reader feels they've been fundamentally had, it's a bad twist. For example:

One-upping other fantasy writers and being ohsoclever toward the reader. This is especially prevalent (and jarring) in Urban Fantasy, where people keep trying to proclaim their version of the Secret World the real one and everyone else a superstitious fraud ("haha, real vampires aren't afraid of garlic" - bad taste in the opening scene, an atrocity in the final confrontation), but it can happen in regular Fantasy too, with magic, technology, medieval customs and character motivation. A good bad example is the death of Ned Stark, often lauded for being shocking to readers used to high heroics. But it's fundamentally a dishonest bait and switch: consider that Ned lived in a world of, fought, and had in his immediate service thieves, murderers, rapists, cannibals and whatnot. There's no way on earth an adult of such importance would be completely unaware of how the world works. Another example is Planescape Torment's "belief is power" - it is by no means a mystery to anyone in the setting; it is a fact of life and rings utterly hollow as a fundamental revelation.

A fascination with breaking one's word like it's some sort of mindboggling achievement is also common. If no supernatural consequences of breaking one's word follow, no one would rely on oaths in the first place!

Smullyan-style puzzles that are red herrings. Puzzles and riddles in fantasy are rooted in myth where they have magical powers via supernatural laws. If labyrinth guards as a security measure aren't a thing, no one would set up fake labyrinth guards to pretend-guard the latrine and raise the alarm once someone starts asking tricky questions.

"It was all a dream/game/movie". If someone wakes up, then goes back to the dream world to have moar adventures, or if dream creatures invade reality, that's okay. Clark Ashton Smith used dreams to legitimize writing itself: like, instead of a story he plain made up, you'd read a story he or someone else from the contemporary world supposedly saw in a dream. A "you're a loser for reading fiction" PSA is a nope.

The Blue Fairy is a terrible character. Protagonists aren't perfect: they can be vain, greedy, short-tempered, whatever. Sometimes they get away with it, sometimes they suffer for it. That's OKAY. But some writers see fit to brutally murder show-don't-tell by intoducing an all-around perfect, narratively supported authority figure whose only job is to shit on the protagonist. There's this one excellent book that drags its characters through hell and back (d'aww), and then in part 2 a prince struts out like Leo, "herpaderp y'all are my prisoners until you learn manners, nyah-ah!" Eeeuuugh.

edit: the edit trick no longer works =(

Some pet peeves (cliché, but also individually terrible)

Language. Puns and codes are to be handled with greatest care. Don't use foreign language titles without solid justification and be extra careful with rhetorically genericized proper nouns. Leviathan is passable, but an influential businessperson can't be a "mogul", nor a geographical hotspot a "mecca". Don't have a character confuse "plains" and "planes" unless they're speaking English. Yes, even if they have English names. (European names generally do well immersion-wise. "Foreign" names raise eyebrows depending on how far from the default they are. I for one would like to see more diversity in the name base, damn the purists' wrinked foreheads.)

On the flipside, don't invent names for measurement units and compass directions to show how ohsoauthentic your world is, this way lies madness. (But a weird calendar is perfectly okay.) Having a continent in the southern hempsphere is okay, flipping east and west is not.

Invent some rituals/traditions which are different from what's practiced in the modern Western world. By no means I urge anyone to be drastically different ("in this culture, babies are trained from birth to keep their heads firmly lodged in their asses" - actual* commercially published fantasy book), but Christian wedding vow exchanges and white wedding gowns on precolonial Aztec princesses are an atrocity. Or, say, "in this world, foie gras is a staple food and ramen is a delicacy" - also an actual* commercial book.

The notion of a "natural life span" is bullshit; no one dies from "old age" per se, they die from specific health issues (cancer, heart attacks, organ failure, etc). All death is metaphysically either "natural" or "unnatural", RL distinction is a matter of public policy. If your world has immortals who extend their life span by eating babies, the evil (if any) lies in eating babies, not in not dying.

Virginity (and, broadly speaking an unhealthy obsession with P in V sex, or an inability to have it) is bullshit in the face of modern sex ed. Someone got impregnated with Satan? Abortion. Star-crossed lovers can't touch each other? Bodygloves or teledildonics. Medieval couple is too poor to have more children? Unless there's a church which proclaimed itself the enemy of subtext, as the meme goes, "family planning advice: use rear entrance".
*No, not really, but close enough.
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Style

People say, "Develop your own unique style". This is a great goal but bad advice. No one invents their own unique style just like that. Instead, find a genius wordsmith with a superb style and try to imitate it. (Source: Pablo Picasso.) I personally adore Greg Egan (sci-fi) and Lynn Abbey (fantasy).
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Recommended salt intake

Some commonly encoutered advice is plain bad or is badly implemented in prominent examples. Starting a story in the middle of an action scene to have the reader instantly interested can easily backfire, and following up with a Past Perfect portion of backstory is a crime against humanity. The advice I gave is geared toward writing generic good adventure fiction and obviously does not account for ogriginal clever ideas. Maybe you're writing a book set in hell whose nine circles are modeled after the undocumented bands of a Soviet pocket calculator and you absolutely need to cite the original manual in full. If so, GO FOR IT. Of the classic nope list, I used John you are the demons, Luke I am your father, It was all a dream (twice in quick succession, while in Ubik-style VR), split personality exactly like in Fight Club, cutting to villains talking about mysterious stuff, an omniscient morality character, a fake riddle that's actually keyed off the answerer's uuid, breaking unbreakable oaths, and that's just off the top of my head. As Neil Gaiman(???) said, "we keep telling the same stories over and over because these are the best stories".

Now THAT was a good read, thank you!

Some points from the story

Yes, it's based in somewhat common medieval world with kings, knight, guards, prostitutes and whatevers. The "magic" in it isn't really magic, no-one can fart fire by wishing. The mages (Elementalists would be a better word, but there is no good translation for it in Finnish) can use elements if they have a source. Fire, water, stuff like that. As they are outlawed by a royal decree, most of them are self taught, albeit some mage communities do exist with "teachers" and stuff.

There is a lot of propaganda going on concerning the mages, but can't really say more without spoiling. The story itself concentrates on one mage and one mage hunter. It doesn't dally much into general politics (mostly because I can't give a damn about the matter, and know too little of it) but there are lots of political turmoil in the background.

I do have a set of rules concerning mages. I know where the "magic" came from and how it operates (purely fantasy, of course)

Thank you for your insight and great post, it was wonderful to read through!

Okay, first tip: learn to break your thoughts into paragraphs. Blocks of text are hard to read.

As for the books, I completely understand your problem. I much prefer design to implementation. Software, games, stories, I have lots of great plans which don't get executed. So here are some tips that might work, but aren't guaranteed, because I rarely manage to follow them well myself. Disclaimer: I never finished a novel, I only finished short stories. The most I ever finished was half a short novel (I had general outlines for 4 novels in the series), or rather half a draft, because in later years I thought the writing was quite crappy (and rewrote chapters 1 and 2 but stopped there).

First of all, to put your idea in writing you don't have to start writing chapters. Start with writing the idea itself. You have all those things in your head, get them written down. That way you can reference them and add details with time. I find that if I keep an idea in my head I keep regurgitating it, going back over things I already know. Sure, the idea continues to develop, but If I write it down it frees my mind to think further. Writing the idea doesn't completely stop me from rethinking about it, but it helps somewhat, and also lets me contrast my current thoughts with previous ones, which can be illuminating at times.

Once you have everything you already know about the books written down, focus on one. That doesn't mean you must ignore the others; if a good thought occurs to you about them, write it down and continue with the story you focus on. (As I said before, writing it down should free your mind to focus on the story at hand, because you know you're not losing that thought).

You don't have to write this story chapter by chapter. Here are a few options:

- Outline the chapters. Just write everything that happens. You will have a full story, but without the little details. You will later be able to fill it up. This way if you have a problem writing dialogue or descriptions, you can skip that and still get everything down.

- Write scenes out of order. Got an idea for a description, an idea for a dialogue, develop it and keep it. No need to force yourself to write things in order. That's the way I usually write. I often only know what happened at a certain point after I flesh out a scene further down the timeline.

- Write a self contained subset of the story, a short story using characters and world details you've developed. It doesn't have to be something that will end up in the book, but it has the advantage of being less frightening due to its smaller scope, and yet it can help you find a voice and learn smaller details of the characters and world.

I don't know if any of these chime with you, writing method is very individual. Really, the only thing that I think is a common good advice is just to sit down and write. I've never set a specific time for it, but I think that the idea I've read of setting a time each day, and not doing anything else during that time (even if you don't end up writing) is a good idea.

Writing...

I tried songwriting, didn't make a dime.

I tried screenwriting, it cost me quite a dime just to to learn that I wouldn't make a dime.

Then I tried freelance journalism and blog writing, and my efforts put me in wacky land surrounded by government spooks and internet psycho-trons... and I didn't make a dime.

Then I went back to enjoying myself posting at the gog forum. I don't make a dime, but it's fun and it doesn't cost a dime either.

First of all, thanks for all these great tips! I'll reply to each one by one:

Admittedly, this is a problem I do have -half my school essays had remarks like "make shorter/more paragraphs", and I even received this remark on a university paper! I think that the reason for which I don't make many paragraphs when writing a continuous text is that my train of thoughts leads from one thought to another in such a way that I can't really tell myself when one idea finishes and the next begins.
One way with which I could avoid the large paragraphs problem is to use a lot of dialog in my novels (even a dialog where one person will narrate something to another will forcibly be shorter than a block of monologue, because not only on a dialog the other person will sometimes interrupt to ask specifications, but also in a r-l conversation long blocks of talking bore people - whenever I manage to persuade myself to sit down and write something, this works rather well). Anyways, continuing...

Yeah, imagining all these nice stories in my head sure is way easier than sitting down and actually writing them! So the most basic problem is still how I get myself to sit and write, but maybe these tips of yours might help by proposing a different approach.

Well, I have put some of my ideas in a text file on my pc, but I only put the general premise e.g. as it'd be written on the back cover of a book if only like 5 lines were allowed. I never felt very confortable before to put more details than that because I felt if I started putting more details I would theoretically write down the whole book in this way! (of course this wouldn't happen, as I wouldn't put dialogs in my ideas text file but still I'll have to try to put all major plot points instead of just the start of the premise as I do now...

I hadn't thought to outline the chapters, thanks for this tip! By trying it on my head with the one novel I'm planning to write at this time (I'll write the outline in a while on a file or something), I see that I'm not very clear on what exactly I'll put in the middle of the book, while the beginning and end are a lot clearer (and the same happens with most of my ideas) -maybe that scared me subconsciously and that's why I didn't want to continue writing? I dunno..

I tried writing a later scene regarding another novel idea once, only to find out that this way of approaching the writing of a novel isn't really compatible with the pencil and paper method of writing -when I have a notebook in front of me, my natural impulse is to write everything in order, while I just now thought that writing chapters out of order would be more viable on a pc, as I could e.g. write each chapter/scene at a separate word file and put them all together when the novel finishes.
But this brings another problem ; that I'm way faster when writing with a pencil than with the keyboard and also make less mistypings (typos are so annoying when I'm trying to write something creative!), and also if I'm on an actual pc I might feel the temptation to check my email, or the gog forum or anything in general that doesn't have anything to do with writing.
I thought I could use my tablet (as I leave that one mostly offline -being online with it eats its battery somewhat fast - but I guess that's to be expected with a tablet bought from Lidl -and it was better than I expected regarding offline battery consumption at least!) but I'd have to use an external (wired) keyboard to write confortably and I don't know if this kind of keyboard is even compatible with greek. I guess that's what I get for having a language that doesn't use the latin alphabet as my maternal one...

So you're suggesting here to write a spin-off? I don't know, it never occured me to put heros from one novel in another story. Maybe I could try to write something short indeed and try to incorporate it in the main novel if it's good enough, because I'm not really fond of spin-offs... I'll see anyways...

Yeah, scheduling seems to me like a major part of what I should do to develop the habit of writing the novel at least (especially as half the places on the innternet where focusing on a novel is discussed mention this)-but I have trouble making schedules in every other matter as well -I'm not even sure how I manage to study for the uni in the 1st place, as I don't have a concrete schedule saying "from this time to this time, I'll do this no matter what". Maybe it's high time I make a writing schedule indeed at least, maybe finding fixed times in which I'd go to the library to do my writing (as I mentioned in my 1st post in this thread too, a library is a good place for me to focus, as it's all quiet and stuff, and only problem is to get my feet to got there!). I'll see about this last thing...

Anyways, thanks for all the tips -I'll try applying some of them later today or tomorrow and will see how this goes...

This is new. I had some sort of epiphany, sat down and wrote 1900 words of dialogue in one sitting. I know this may not seem much, but it is for me. This has never happened to me before...

Perhaps the block is subsiding?

Heeey congrats man. Pumping out 1900 words in a single sitting is great work.

Regardless of how you write, you'll have to end up with the text on PC. Two things I can suggest:

Learn to touch type. It's a useful skill.

Alternately, get a device with support for Greek handwriting recognition. Just googling it looks like it's available for Windows and Android. It might not work well with a standard tablet (a stylus may not be accurate enough), but who knows. At most you'll have to get a tablet that is geared for this and comes with its own pen.

If that's the case, try to realise that fleshing out the other parts can help you understand the middle part more. Again, depending on you, you might find that thinking logically about how the start can lead to the end helps, or it could be that learning more about the characters by writing the first part will naturally suggest how they'll want to continue.

In a way. It can be something that's outside the story, such as something that happened to a character before the story started, or it can be a part of the story, just framed as a self contained unit. For example if your characters encounter a monster in a valley and fight it, you can include short descriptions of background and characters as part of the story, and it doesn't really matter what happened before or after, because you have setup, confrontation and resolution in this unit of story. That's a complete story you can finish with a lot less trouble, get feedback about, and learn from with regards to the rest of the story.

Every people has different character and style so what i say may not suit you. Just how i write my novels and stories.

NOVICE

1- Write. Continue writing. It will take time. Dont give up.

2- If its fiction, dont hesitate to create new words or names. Want a new country name? Make up a word. Tartintanya!! Read it out loud a couple of times. Is it nice to say it? Then go for it. Same for people, machine, spell names. You are the God of your region and anything you say is correct.

3- At the buttom of your novel, make a list of names, places, special notes. Like

Zrtperontanzan: My main here. 5 feet 10 inches(180cm). Dark curly hair. Green eyes.

Emilanzontanzan: Zrtperontanzan's mother. 50 years old. "blast it" is her favorite word.

ID-zizer: A machine which Securt forces use that automatically reads IDs and give info about them.

... a list like this would help you find something later.

ADVANCED

1- Nobody likes a story if it is written in poor grammer/style. Example:

"John went to kitchen. Drank milk. Got outside. Turned into flying insect. Wwent to police station. Got himself killed. The end"

What the hell was that? No creativity, no flow in lines, no passion, no wave in emotions. Dont write plain lines.

2- Read other books meanwhile. This will help you fix your language and be able to create more appealing sentences.

3- Be loyal to your novel. You may have million other story ideas but dont fall to temptation. Else you will have 50 unfinished novels in 30 years :))

4- Find someone that is good with literature and make him/her/them read your story every 50 pages. Even if you read your story 10 times, you may not be able to notice some mistakes because its correct in your mind. Other people on the other hand will tell you if something is wrong. 2 eyes better than 1 right?

Goodluck.
Engin.

EDIT: Corrected the word Novel (was noval)

I know the text will have to end up in an electronic format one way or another, and that's why I had the dilemma either write on the pc/tablet, slower but at least it'll be there in a universal format (doc), or write on paper and having to type the whole thing to the pc afterwards.
As for touch typing (called "blind" typing in greek, because the typist doesn't look at the keyboard at any moment), I tried to learn a bit of it in Xmas last year for entirely different reasons, but gave up as in the initial stages I was writing with 10 fingers way less things that I normally can with literally 2 fingers (left-hand middle finger and right-hand index finger) -even with typos I think I manage 30-40 words a minute (I'm not sure of the exact speed as I haven't counted but I type at a reasonable enough speed to be able to write non-fiction stuff there...).
Handwriting recognition is definitely out of the question though, because the recognition software totally wouldn't recognise my squiggles -writing fast has the inconvenience of making the writing more unintelligible than it normally is, and in some cases I myself try to decipher what I wrote incredibly fast (e.g. note-taking during classes) ! At least when writing electronically what I write will always be readable...
I had thought to get this wired keyboard that also doubles as a case (I wanted a wired one because bluetooth also eats battery) and this app in case the keyboard won't recognise greek characters from the get-go. I know I can focus on a tablet way more than I can on a pc, because I'm reading some documents there and do not feel the need to interrupt to got eh internet or something when I do so-also I have WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office) which supports doc files, so I can easily migrate whatever files to my pc if the need arises...

A little while ago, I finally set some time to write a basic overview of each chapter, and apparently the middle parts were devoid of major plot changes mostly because I seem to want to devote these to some more character development, some flashbacks and a more detailed description of the mentality in the new environment the main protagonist has found himself in. But I'm not certain which context of events will give the trigger for the aforementioned things I want to develop as of yet...

Well, I have quite some flashbacks I want to put in my book in a natural flow, so most of them I had thought would take place via dialog. A couple of these concern some experiences the female protagonist (I have a duo of main characters) had when she was younger, so I guess these would provide some background on her character and her current condition, and as they are practically self-contained memories/stories with a beginning and an end to them, I could theoretically write these separately and adjust the dialog around the already-written flashback instead of writing the memory inside the dialog in one shot, combined with the dialog itself. But maybe flashbacks don't work that way and I'll have to write some other small scale incident -maybe even something that could be added to the middle of the novel. I'll see I guess...

Anyway, thanks again for the input!

1st of all, thank you as well for trying to give some advice. Here's my replying to each of your points:
Point 1 is probably the most basic of all. I'm currently trying to see if writing in a tablet will do anything to help me establish the habit of writing -will see how this goes...
About point 2, what I'm currently trying to write involves a parallel universe so close to ours, that even the names of locations are the same! Other ideas of mine aren't that based in real names, and I have made some placeholders for the moment until I'll actually tackle these, but anyways making up names isn't very tough for me -the making up stuff part is the easy part for me, the actually sitting down and writing all this stuff is the hard part for me...

I won't wonder here what exactly is a "noval" -only a typo hopefully, despite it being repeated further down... What is important here is that, while I know in my head my characters and some basic traits of them, I hadn't really thought to write all of these down somewhere - I'll try to later -maybe it'll give me some new insights...

Well, at least this story is somewhat surreal and would deserve further development (e.g. how exactly did John become an insect? By drinking the milk, or was it something else more nefarious?). But yes, I get your point here. Thankfully, I can write stuff just fine when I devote myself to this process -the whole problem was that I just couldn't continue what I had started on...

Point 2: I try to, but do not always have time nowadays to read litterature. Good for me I guess that I read quite a lot when I was younger and can now proportionally "slack off" and not read anything that doesn't have to do with whatever work I have to do... :P
Point 3: That's indeed hard for me. I've written the 1st chapters of 3 novels in the last year, and nothing else. I decided I'd pick one fo them and try to finish it, so I can tackle the next one afterwards... Will see how this goes...
Point 4: I had developed 4 chapters of a different idea a few years ago (that's the longest I ever managed to write regarding an unfinished novel) and showed a couple to my parents who are educated enough. That was a bad idea, as they now tell me every now and then (especially my mother) "When are you going to finish that novel you had shown me? I want to read the rest of it!" I reply "I abandoned that project temporarily" She's like "Why would you do that?" etc. With this I mean, if you're prone to not continuing with whatever you start -as I am- it might not be a good idea to show it to others, as they might expect you to actually finish it, and I personally couldn't up until now stick to writing something till the very end. Anyways, this might work if I manage to continue writing something and not abandon it...

Anyways, thanks for your input too!