I'm currently in the process of writing my first piece that's longer than a short story...

I'm about 10 chapters deep into a 50 page novella.

I already have my basic story outline completed and I'm working on filling up my character info cheat sheets.

Any ideas on what else I could do to help?

If you're curious about the work itself, ping me.

I wouldn't call myself a professional writer by any stretch, but I really do love the craft. My advice to you may not be what you're looking for but I let you in on a few little secrets that help me.

Is there a certain part of your novella/story line that you have incredibly clear in your mind, be it a character change, resolution, ending? I find starting at the part I have the grasp of or have a lot of ideas for can help. It allows you to build around and can help stimulate ideas for other chapters. It is a bit unorthodox to skip around in your writing process, but it truly helps me.

If the main focus of my story/the part I have outlined the clearest is a scene where the narrator learns something unfavorable about another character, I'll start there. By writing a scene where some type of reaction/character change occurs, it allows me to see where my character began and where I need to get him fairly early on in my drafting. Even if I decide to scrap the scene or change it significantly this type of skipping around still functions as pre-writing.

Thanks for the input!

My pleasure! I hope it's helpful

--Characters (are they multi-dimensional or flat?) --Setting-- (make us see what you see, smell, feel, taste) --Plot (do you have a clear plot or is it convoluted?) --Pacing (day-by-day, event-to-event, little things and big things)

Those are the kinds of things to think about when writing, especially longer than a short story.

Part of the trick is coming up with a story that has a whole novel in it. I've had trouble all my life until late coming up with a story that wasn't a million words long, but that's because I've always made up stories with heroes who had a lot of character to develop, villains nefarious enough to keep running in the long-term, plots that require a lot of elements to complete. And that's come easy to me because I prefer the high fantasy genre which is full of all that awesome stuff.

Or, you were a bit vague - if you mean you aren't trouble getting the story to be long enough but just how to get writing it...a few things I do when I get stuck. One, I tell the story to someone. Someone who loves me and has the patience to let me tell them the story - nowadays that's usually my husband, but before that it was my mom or my brother or a close friend or sometimes a boyfriend (not all of them had that sort of tolerance =P then again, some of my best stories are literally hours long to tell...). I found a lot of the time if I had a spot where I didn't know what happened, in repeated tellings, "And then after they finally find the Gatekeeper and get to the Nether and...stuff happens, I dunno, it's like important and stuff, and then they finally get to Death's citadel..." turns slowly into, "And then in the Nether they [creepy trials they have to pass to get to Death's citadel]."

Also roleplaying with characters helps me - it helps me immensely in developing characters with which I'm less familiar, and it helps me uncover plot elements with solid characters. I already know them well enough that when roleplaying, I'm more likely to find something that rings true - a "this happens in my story!" moment. Or something else similar.

If you're an outlining person, which I don't tend to be, I find notecards helpful. Especially if you're shaky on the plot. You just write a synopsis of each major plot event on one card - this way you can lay them out in front of you, rearrange them, add them, remove them. It's a nice visual. There are so many ways to outline, this is the only one that works for me (if I outline at all) and I only discovered it by trying a bunch of others, so try a bunch of different stuff!

I also almost never use character profiles - I have one book that's an exception but there are a looot of characters for its size and a lot of them are tertiary and they all have specialties that are really important and I can't remember them all for everyone without a little help. In that case, the skeleton is something along the lines of name, age, birthday, gender, race (it's modern fantasy), role, specialties, bio, weapons. All those things I can't usually remember - which yes, includes name sometimes. I usually remember race and gender is preeeetty easy to remember, but everything else can be really hard.

Anyway hope those are helpful tips to you.

Length is only good when it's not forced.

What I've found seems to make me write long things is adding over time. Writing, then coming back to it after a while and fixing/adding stuff. Outlining chapters, then when I write the chapters I fix/add stuff.