Bleh.

I know how it is supposed to end (big "battle" ala Alamo, Zulu, Wake Island)....

Just can't seem to write it well.  Seems like such a boring ending.

Cut and paste the ending of one of the gazillion other Zombie stories.

Have the main hero fall in love with one of the zombies, so he ends up muzzling the thing and keeps it in a basement feeding it a steady diet of his dead friends and tofu.

At least that's how I would end it.

Disease:
transfered by bodily fluids
subject goes into a deep death like coma
wakes wanting to kill and feed off anything in sight
as disease progresses, some basic memories come back like:
-ability to use basic tools like sticks and rocks
-knows that food comes in those pretty cans and boxes in the grocery store
-smart enough to avoid gunfire if possible, hide and stalk prey
-smart enough to seek shelter from the weather


The books is a total end of the world type - entire US is wiped out etc....

Edit: this sucks, I got 70 pages of the damn thing......

I had a zombie story going on in the Survival Forum fiction section for a while. Haven't added anything for close to a year.

I'm just plain stuck. I've sat down and tried to write more multiple times, but I just can't think of anything good. Severe writers block...

Just run over some scenarios in your head, and come up with something you really like. Don't just force something out because you need content...

Quoted: I had a zombie story going on in the Survival Forum fiction section for a while. Haven't added anything for close to a year. I'm just plain stuck. I've sat down and tried to write more multiple times, but I just can't think of anything good. Severe writers block... Just run over some scenarios in your head, and come up with something you really like. Don't just force something out because you need content...

Actually everything I've read on writing says to just keep writing.  IE force it, then brutally edit/rewrite as necessary.

I know what I want the end state to be when the story is done.  I'm just second guessing my planned "climax" portion of the story.

I don't want it to be to much gun/military porn, and some of my little ideas I'm having trouble translating to a good story/narration as opposed to say a film.

I wrote a zombie story and sent it out on e-mail to my close friends and family.

I had fun writing it.

I had my survivors holed up in an abandoned SAC missile base (pretty fun premise from a writing standpoint).

I had my zombie virus be a "slate wiper" and kill everyone except for these people.

Then I had them repopulate the earth from their own small gene pool, and ended with a scene set 100 years in the future.

It is always fun writing about the initial outbreak, running and gunning, fortifying somewhere to hide etc.

But once that is done, it is just like damn, this is boring.

I have 11 chapters (5-9 pages each) and probably can fit in a good two to three chapters of additional back story I kind of glossed over, but I want to write the ending, or even the non-ending-ending...

Quoted: It is always fun writing about the initial outbreak, running and gunning, fortifying somewhere to hide etc. But once that is done, it is just like damn, this is boring. I have 11 chapters (5-9 pages each) and probably can fit in a good two to three chapters of additional back story I kind of glossed over, but I want to write the ending, or even the non-ending-ending...

Right, that's why you really need to think of some original twists to fill up the middle.  I ran into the same problem.

I can't reveal what my "twists" were though, that's copyrighted!  

And they all ate happily after.  

Quoted:

BEST STORY EVER!

Quoted: Quoted: I had a zombie story going on in the Survival Forum fiction section for a while. Haven't added anything for close to a year. I'm just plain stuck. I've sat down and tried to write more multiple times, but I just can't think of anything good. Severe writers block... Just run over some scenarios in your head, and come up with something you really like. Don't just force something out because you need content... Actually everything I've read on writing says to just keep writing.  IE force it, then brutally edit/rewrite as necessary. I know what I want the end state to be when the story is done.  I'm just second guessing my planned "climax" portion of the story. I don't want it to be to much gun/military porn, and some of my little ideas I'm having trouble translating to a good story/narration as opposed to say a film.

Well, I guess there's a reason you shouldn't take advice on writers block from someone who hasn't been able to come up with a new chapter in a year...

Maybe I'll force out a few paragraphs sometime and see how it goes...

It sounds like a boring ending, too.

Here are a couple ideas, which aren't particularly great, but might help turn a few gears in your head.

1. A cure for the plague is discovered, and a character injects himself with it and sacrifices himself to the zombies in order to communicate it to them.

2. A cure is discovered, and can be distributed easily, but it gets to them too late, and the scientist character looks down at his army friend character, a zombie looking back up at him.  Possibly a single survivor the army friend and his fellows had died to protect.

3. I often think about a minor subplot in some online chapter or two I read, about the start of a zombie plague.  The character was in his fortified house, with electricity, reading an internet post from a woman several states away, trapped in her attic.  She's not heard from again, and the subplot isn't pursued, and I'd've liked to have seen it completed.  

4. Little is frequently made of loved ones in zombie worlds.  How would someone react if they came face to face with their now zombie wife, if she and they had been fully realized characters and not just plot points?  If the movie I Am Legend had ended in him seeing his wife and son in the attacking mob, would he have shot them, or joined them, or been prevented from (or encouraged into) one or the other by the new lady or boy?

5. What radio or television transmission might the survivors hear or see before or during the final battle that might be significant to them?

6. What if the zombiedom is an evolutionary step toward a higher form of life?  Another idea along the "maybe we don't have the right to shoot them" line.  I'm not terribly fond of it, but, again, wheels turning.

7. What if the zombie outbreak was a deliberate action by some sort of evil doctor character?  This alone is, of course, the most common approach, but what if there were actually a reason to be sympathetic toward the evil doctor?  What would compel you to view him as the greatest victim of the situation, if, having been exposed to him throughout the book as a fleshed out character, you saw him doing something or watching something or thinking something in the closing scene of the book?  I don't mean in an I Am Legend the movie sense, I mean he actually set out to turn everyone into zombies, for some reason.  Maybe it was necessary?

A plot point I havent developed, just aluded to.  My "zombies" are essentially rabid cavemen in their thoughts and skills.

A zombie chapter?

End the book from the point of view of the "Zombies" who can communicate, recognize loved ones etc?

Hm, I think that gets close to the I Am Legend movie (the alternate ending, anyway, where the head zombie recognizes that the main character is trying to help him), but it's not a bad path to wander down mentally.  You could make a zombie perspective ending work.

Here's an interesting thought; have any of us ever read a zombie battle from the zombie's perspective?

Quoted: Hm, I think that gets close to the I Am Legend movie (the alternate ending, anyway, where the head zombie recognizes that the main character is trying to help him), but it's not a bad path to wander down mentally.

Yea but no more than "find a cure, don't find a cure" thing is.

Besides my characters/locations are totally not set up for doing research on the plague much less curing it.\

Might be at least worth a chapter on it...

the cure turns out to be rectal semen injections, so all the survivors PIITB of the zombies.

The end.

Go up river, dude.

The zombies are the salmon and the Jerry Bears from space eat some zomibie ass.

what is the story (main problem) of the book.  does it involve the survivors trying or survive, or does it cove the whole zombie infestation/scourge?
does it end with an open end for more sequals, or is it epic?


most stories have 3 parts.  the intro, the middle and the end/climax/resolution.  you usually see it in most movies if you look for it. what have you written?

if the zombies were enginered instead of being a naturally phonomenon, have a side plot about the motive of those who made the zombies.  why did they do it? was it deliberate or accidentaly?  if deliberate, what did they hope to accomplish?  are the zombie the entier, or are the zombies phase 1 of plan.. or maybe the zombies are phase 3 or 6 of the plan... what was phase 1 and 2.

Quoted: Yea but no more than "find a cure, don't find a cure" thing is.

True, true.

Besides my characters/locations are totally not set up for doing research on the plague much less curing it.

It's your story.  You can go back and add anything to it that you want to add.  Snippets of communication with a CDC lab, for instance, at various points in the book, with some early event getting them in touch originally.  Or whatever.

Quoted: img70.imageshack.us/img70/5226/youarethedemonswm8.jpg

That's the best damn zombie story ever!!!