Hello Everybody,
First of all, I want to apologize for my English. I'm Turkish. I hope I can express myself.  :)

Last February, I started to write a drama novel. Everyting was going well until a few weeks ago. I finished the book in my head. But these days, it is very hard to transfer it to the paper. I have written 90 pages. I need to write at least 20 pages more. I know the way I will go, but somewhow I can't write.

The sentences I make is like a trash nowadays. When I read first 90 pages to check, I see everyting is okey.

How can I get ride of this situation? Have you ever lived any experience like this? I need your suggestion.

Thank you for your help.

It's psychological. To do with fear. Because finishing the book makes it real. It's no longer an undefined possibility.. It's an actual realised reality.

A subconscious fear of mediocrity, failure, or even success is stopping you.

Best thing to do is just to acknowledge it, talk yourself through it, tell yourself that it's the first draft and doesn't need to be perfect, then just try to write it.

Some other tricks:

1. Lower your standards. Just write garbage to finish it, knowing that you can fix it later.
2. Write using pomodoros. Just set a stop watch and write as much as you can in a short time... Five minutes, ten minutes. When you have a strict time limit like that, often your brain finds hidden resources.

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films It's psychological. To do with fear. Because finishing the book makes it real. It's no longer an undefined possibility.. It's an actual realised reality. A subconscious fear of mediocrity, failure, or even success is stopping you. Best thing to do is just to acknowledge it, talk yourself through it, tell yourself that it's the first draft and doesn't need to be perfect, then just try to write it. Some other tricks: 1. Lower your standards. Just write garbage to finish it, knowing that you can fix it later. 2. Write using pomodoros. Just set a stop watch and write as much as you can in a short time... Five minutes, ten minutes. When you have a strict time limit like that, often your brain finds hidden resources.

Good advice

I agree with Rick; this seems psychological. There're a number of ways you could work through that, including the ones Rick has illustrated. One thing to keep in mind is that you've already done the majority of the work. If you've written 90 pages, you can write 20, especially if you already have the rest of the book in your head. If there're any major issues, you'll only have 20 pages (or less) to reconcile (I say 20 for the sake that you seem pleased with the previous 90, though I wouldn't discount the fact that they might need some work as well).

In the interest of being circumspect, I'll propose a second possibility: there might be something wrong with your ending. If that's the case, find it and fix it. If it's something simple, I don't expect you'd have a hard time doing so. On the other hand, it could be that there's some element of your ending that's not working but you're attached to for whatever reason, which means eliminating it will be painful. That's always tough, but it is part of the process from time to time, and removing a problem area will make room for something better (possibly much better). Even if you're not sure what to do at that point, you've at least identified the problem and freed yourself of a certain confusion.

Thank all of you for your advises. I'm very lucky to find this website and meet you.

Yesterday I finished my first novel. 80k words, which is 282 pages formatted using publishers guidelines in Word.

The great advice above about the psychological aspect I agree with 100 percent. In addition though, I picked up these words in your original post “I finished the book in my head.” Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood here but it sounds like you’ve written the novel straight from your mind and not written a detailed outline beforehand.

Every time I’ve tried to write a novel or a feature screenplay from my head I’ve struggled. What I’ve found, is not matter how much I dislike the process, I need to write a detailed outline before I start the first page. For my novel, I adapted it from one of my own feature screenplays which turned out to be the best outline ever. I was never lost, I never struggled to write the next page and I knew exactly how many words I had to write to get to the end. From the very beginning I aimed for 80k words for the first draft and I ended up with 80,514.

The screenplay in question, before I wrote that I spent weeks writing a detailed set of notes for the outline. Any big project, you can’t just pull from your head and write solidly for several months without getting into a mess.

If you have written a detailed outline, forgive my prattle, forget all of the above and just concentrate on the psychological aspects lol!

Hello MarkRenshaw,
Yes, before I start to write, I prepared road map to go. Otherwise I can get lost in the story and can't find a way to go. So I used the sentence "I finished it in my head". :)

Thank you for you advise. Good luck with your novel. :)

Good luck with it. Let us know how you get on.

And stick around. Always good to have people from different places around.