Creative Writing Guide: How to Finally Finish a Rough Draft of Your Story

It’s hard to have a fun and meaningful creative writing project. You’re passionate about it, but when you sit down to write, it feels frustrating and overwhelming. Sometimes nothing is coming out right. Sometimes you struggle to write anything at all.

Yet, authors who are the most prolific and publish a lot of completed works tend to make more money. They build a larger fan base and have more successful careers. Example- Danielle Steele.

So boosting your productivity as a writer is super important. It benefits your finances, your work, and your self-esteem. It also makes people take you more seriously as a writer.

This post is written by someone who is clinically disabled and unable to work a 9-5 job, so I understand how hard it can be to overcome motivation challenges to writer’s block. I hope you get something useful out of my post!

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Unlock Your Inner Alchemist: An INFJ’s Guide to Finishing That First Draft

Writing a novel can feel like chasing a phantom—a compelling, all-consuming vision that thrives in the imagination but often stalls out on the page. For highly imaginative and empathetic types like writers, the trap is often getting caught in the vast complexity of our own making, feeling low-motivation, or losing the driving goal that started the project.

Motivation waxes and wanes.

It’s time to move past the dream and embrace the discipline.

I’m an INFJ type, so I’m passionate about helping others. I’ve also had to learn to be practical about my ideals. (To learn your Myers Briggs type, take this quiz.) I mention this because understanding oneself is part of the key to unlocking greater motivation and alignment with your goals. If you’re really stuck on why you can’t seem to write, I’d recommend downloaded the app Dimensional and learning more about your personality, values, and ambitions.

Now let’s dig in.

Novel drafting isn’t about perfection or being the most creative; it’s about power and continuous forward achievement. Tap into your competitive side. Be willing to write in a new place, from a new state of mind or perspective.

Here’s how to channel your spontaneous, creative energy and finally complete your world:

1. Thrive in the Structure: Build Your Literary Sanctuary City

You may value spontaneity, but your creative self actually thrives in structure. Think of your writing schedule like a dedicated space—a haven—where nothing in the outside world can touch you, unless you choose to explore it.

• Customize your daily routine: I have children and other responsibilities- but I still customize my days and my lifestyle to suit me. Don’t let the world bully you into taking on so much responsibility that you can’t write. Don’t be afraid to switch to working nights, or working from home. And you don’t have to spend all your leisure time with your kids- let them play with some other kids their own age! Don’t agree to new tasks and obligations that will infringe on your self care.
• Establish a Boundary: Set a non-negotiable daily word count of just 250 words. This is just a couple of sentences- a paragraph. This creates the “walls” you need to work within and protects your creative resources. Many days you will write far more. And any one can handle a minimum of 250 words. You’ll feel more productive doing this small amount each day.
• Embrace the Dichotomy: Allow for imaginative, chaotic scene-writing within a calm, composed, daily structure. Have a ritual- light a candle before you sit down to write, or make a playlist to listen to before writing from the perspective of a special character. Designate a backpack with your writing supplies in it and go to a new location. You could go to a coffee shop, a park, or a new city on the train.
• Make Use of Technology: Ask AI to help you brainstorm ideas for your story when you get stuck. You can still do the writing yourself- but AI can help you identify plot holes or generate seeds for potential ideas. Or try using Daily Prompt to brainstorm ideas for your novel. Their site and app has a feature. You put in a brief summary of what you want to write, and it generates relevant prompts for your story to push you deeper into the content.
• Daydream Before Sleeping: When you shut out the lights in the evening, daydream about the characters and the world of your story. It’s a soothing way to fall asleep, will inspire you, and will steer your mind away from worrying and towards imagining the life of your book. This will also help you manifest your goals because you will be aligning your thoughts and emotions with what you see in your mind’s eye- the first step to conscious creation.

2. The Power of Conflict: Let Your Characters Drive the Plot

When motivation wanes, check your central conflict. Is it strong and intriguing enough to propel your characters to their deepest, most desperate ends? Are you digging deep into their feelings and letting the characters clash and overcome? In ways that make you feel passionate and connected? Conflict is the fuel of your narrative engine.

To this end, you can get a composition book and journal from the perspective of your character. This will also help you find their unique voice.

In the journal put: diary entries written by the character, poems and quotes that remind you of them, song lyrics, printed out art or drawings arranged into their vision board…

In my novel Dark Bloom the themes are anger, passion, and injustice. Characters are running from their pasts and dealing with massive secrets, and are continually making decisions on the edge of a dangerous world, deciding who to be loyal to and who to protect. The goal of this urgency is to push the plot forward and keeps the reader involved in the stakes. The characters are more relatable when they’re fighting to achieve something the reader also cares about.

• Raise the Stakes: Make their goal existential. If they fail, what does their world lose? (In my novel love, sexual power, families, and the existence of entire realms are all in jeapordy).
• Infuse Emotion: Leverage your empathetic nature to weave deep, powerful emotions into the narrative. Give your characters conflicting core values that force them to make impossible choices. On the clock- like a ticking time bomb.
  • What do they want that they can’t yet have?
  • How do the other people in your story respond to their emotions?
  • Who is in their way, and why?
  • What holds this character back from evil?
  • To bring each emotion to life, use sensory details- how it feels, tastes, smells, looks to experience that.

3. The Climax is Your Finish Line: See the End to Write the Journey

Don’t wait for your ending to appear magically. Be goal-oriented. Figure out the emotional and physical destination of your story and write toward it every day. You don’t need a full scene or even to know exactly what’s going to happen- but you should have a general sense of how you want each character to end up, and why they end up that way. The end of your draft is less about literary perfection and more about spiritual exploration— often a journey that forces characters (and writers) to question their values and accept this ending as fascinating, realistic, and surprising. And what makes it a page turner is the build up- the tension and drive and passion that works as fuel towards the ultimate confrontation that we see in the climax.

• Focus on the Core: Is your novel a romance, a fantasy, or an exploration of complex psychology? Know your genre and your themes. Stick to that core and let everything else fall away for the moment. In one sentence, what does your character achieve in the end? Or fail to achieve, if it’s a tragedy?
• Embrace the Dark Side: Every character has a shadow side. Don’t be afraid to explore themes like power, obsession, and self-direction throughout the story, even when they lead to complex, graphic, or controversial places. Get clear on how your character’s dark side plays into the climax and ending of the novel- do they shed that toxicity, embrace it, channel it into something new? In my novel, characters are very angry at God and the world. What will become of them? Communicate to your reader why your characters matter, even though they are imperfect. One character I wrote matters because she’s brave and honest- allowing her to challenge people who need to be knocked down a peg.

Now, close your browser, quiet the noisy critics, and go pour that profound inner world onto the page. Tap into your own bravery and honesty- write what you know to be true. Your readers are waiting.

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Curious to read about a world of outlawed magic, shapeshifting Fae, a deadly devil’s bargain, a complicated prince, and the dark forces threatening to merge Earth, Hell, and the many realms? Wish there were more stories exploring anger expressed through femininity, or anger at a God who doesn’t save us? My debut novel Dark Bloom is available on paperback and Kindle Unlimited.