I have. I hit a rut where I felt the stories were starting to blend together. I couldn’t figure out how to stay true to the characters while making the story more unique and interesting. To overcome it, I stopped trying to meet the status quo. I focused on character development, set up a few scenes, and really just let the characters tell their own stories.
I stopped wanting to perfect the story’s style and focused on just doing a good job of telling a great story. I worried about so many of the little things (word count, perfect grammar, dialect, character names, etc.) that I don’t believe truly matter if you just focus on telling the story. I would spend two weeks on a chapter that was just noise to the storyline. No more. Never again.
