Hey Nonnie! 

ohgod, look, I stumbled into this the way I stumble into everything, but okay, I guess I can tell you what works for me? It will be different for you, but I hope some of this applies anyway 🙂

I began with absurdly high expectations of myself. Frankly, I STILL have absurdly high expectations of myself. 

Never give up, never surrender! See it through, no matter how damn long it takes. You aren’t abandoning it: you’re on hiatus. Totally different thing.

Research is awesome and great and fun, and you can dive into it for hours and get lost in all the minutiae of this world Tolkien gifted us with… but don’t forget to tell the story. The story is what people are here to read, after all. Keep it moving forward and don’t get bogged down by the endless details.

Stop thinking of your OCs as ‘OCs’. Start thinking of them just as characters. Because they are, they are as much a character as the canon characters are. You just have to be the one to establish them, rather than the source material.

Make your characters – ALL of them, original or canon – affect the story. They must affect it, change its direction. If your original characters are only there as wallpaper while the canon ones do all the action, then of course they will feel less real. Real people affect the world. For instance, in Sansukh the original characters that change the direction and even the tone of the narrative are Gimizh, Merilin, Baris, Gimris, Bani, Thira, Laindawar, Laerophen, Jeri, Kara… I could go on!!! They affect each other, they affect the story and they affect the world. They may not always affect the narrative of the canon characters – but they change the story by their presence. They have narrative weight.  

Give characters conflicting views and motivations. Make them struggle and strive for their goal. Let the reader see them fail, and succeed, and fail, and succeed again. If you want your reader to sympathise with a character for a long long time, they need to be able to fail. There need to be consequences for that failure. And those consequences need to be dealt with.

Don’t bash the canon characters – somebody out there loves that character, I promise you, and will be hurt and pissed if you demonise them. Find more motivation for them instead, or a journey that takes them into their challenge zone. I did this for Thranduil especially. But I was also careful not to demonise Denethor – he was poisoned by the Palantir and Sauron, after all.

Think of the building of tension as a slow SLOW crescendo, leading to the high point (peak tension or change of circumstances!) and then a swift decrescendo (denouement/new situation or result). Rinse and repeat, don’t waste a moment before allowing the tension to begin building again. Don’t allow the tension to slacken entirely. Make a change of circumstances count. Otherwise, why have the climax in the first place? This makes your action more dramatic and meaningful in the long term. It also helps with working out the flow of a long story.

If you are desperate to write a particular scene, write it. Skip the stuff in between, and write the scene that is bugging your brain and won’t leave you alone. Then fill in the intervening stuff. 

Write notes. Take photos. Write other things (music, for me). Draw pictures. Enjoy this, it’s meant to be fun!