Last week welliewalks posted to the guestbook on my website that she hadn’t been able to post directly on the blog, so I asked you all, and the problem seems to be more widespread than just one person, although not universal. The trouble isn’t with us, says David, my high-tech husband, so we can’t fix it. If you can’t get through, just post your comment on the guestbook (following the link on the right to the website) and I’ll approve it there and move it to the blog. I love to hear from you!
On March 29, 2011, Erica wrote, Okay, so I was wondering, I always have tons of different story ideas (like notebooks full of them) but I can never finish them. At this point I have one short story done and one picture book rough draft for my English class. I can think in my head of almost exactly how I want it to end but I can never get it out on paper. My mom thinks that it’s because if I finish something then I will feel the need to do something with it and she thinks that it’s because I’m afraid people won’t like it. Whatever the reason I don’t know how to fix it. Help?
Many are afflicted with unfinished-itis, and the reasons vary, so here are some possibilities:
Erica’s mother suggested one. Finishing is the first step toward exposing your work to criticism and even rejection in the sometimes cold, cruel publishing world. Your fingers may curl into fists at the prospect, and fists can’t type.
A solution to this may be to find friends, relatives, teachers, librarians, a critique group, to show your stories to even before they’re finished. Encouragement may push you to completion. The writers in particular may have useful ideas about where to go next in your tale. Showing at an early stage can reduce the fear of criticism, if not wipe it out entirely. You’re in an early stage. Naturally your story needs work. Helpful advice is welcome.
And just a word about unhelpful advice and unhelpful criticism. See it for what it is, unhelpful, useless, irrelevant. If somebody reads what you’ve got and says something like, “I hope you have other talents, dear,” ignore and do not show your writing to this person again. To yourself you can say, Yeah, and how many books have you written, Mister or Missus?
Unhelpful advice can masquerade as the helpful sort and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other. Someone might say, “You should try to make your prose more lyrical.” Press for specifics. “What do you mean?” you ask. “Where in my story is lyricism needed?” If your critic can explain, then this may be useful, but if she says, “That’s just what I think,” put it in the unhelpful category.
You may be someone who needs a deadline. If you’re not writing a piece that’s due in school and no publisher is clamoring for your work, you may not feel the urgency, and when another idea comes along, you may jump ship. So set a deadline. If you need to, enlist a friend to help you stick to your writing. Whether you meet the deadline or not, you’ll get more done, and you can always set a new deadline. I think this is why NaNoWriMo is so terrific. It pushes you. Even if you don’t make the word count, you’ve written a lot.
You may not have found the right story, the one that finishes itself. If you keep writing, you’ll get there.
The plodding nature of writing gets to you. You start resisting writing the details. Your story is magical, thrilling. Why do you have to mention that your main character’s feet hurt or that her best friend has a dab of catsup on her chin? And why can’t you just tell the reader that the friend is loyal and also illogical? Why do you also have to demonstrate it? You want to put in the broad strokes, the essence of your story, and be done with it. Eventually you get so sick of the details that you give up and start something shiny and new. Or you write down ideas, which don’t have to be detailed at all.
The remedy here is to limit the task. Write a scene. Don’t think about how many scenes remain. After you’ve written one, write another, little dotted lines along the road of your narrative.
If you despise writing the scenes and can’t bring yourself to complete any of them, but you adore coming up with ideas and planning out stories, you may be more of a storyteller than a novelist. Or graphic novels may be the right form for you.
You don’t want the characters you love to suffer, so you get stuck. I suspect this is afflicting me now in the second mystery. I love Elodie, and I have to make some awful things happen to her, so I’m progressing at the speed of an inchworm. Since I’m facing this myself, it’s hard to know what the solution is. In my case it’s probably just inching along, and possibly that will work for you, too. Pat yourself heartily on the back at the end of each completed page.
Or jump right in and bring the dreadful event about. Then write up to it, if you’re not at that point in your story. If you don’t even know what the tragedy will be yet, write a scene in which your main endures misery, which may not be the misery you eventually use. See how he responds. Decide what helps him pull through if he does pull through. Then, when you get to the actual crisis you’ll have prepared yourself. I think I’m going to try this as soon as I finish wrtiting this post!
You haven’t explored any of your ideas sufficiently to know which ones are keepers. Pick three of your ideas or your petered-out drafts. In notes ask yourself questions. What lit you up when you started? What turned you off? What will it take to bring back the spark? (No negativity allowed.) How can you define your main character so you want to have a long-term relationship with her? What fascinates you about her? Ask yourself about setting, plot, other characters. Quit note-writing and move over to the story when you find yourself eager to start.
What I’m suggesting are just ideas, which may not work for you. The most important thing is to keep writing, whether you finish something next month or three years from now.
These prompts need some setting up:
Right now I’m riding home from New York on a commuter train, a wonderful place for observation. Most of the seats face the backs of the seats ahead, like in an airplane, but some, the less desirable ones, where I am, face the fronts of the seats ahead without good legroom between. I’m in an aisle seat. There’s a middle seat and a window seat next to me, across from me the same. When I sat down at Grand Central where the train originates, the only other occupant of our six-seat grouping was a man in the window seat facing me, who had placed his briefcase on the seat facing him, a little piggishly, I think, but it’s not interfering with my comfort so I don’t care.
After a few minutes a woman sits across from me and we arrange our legs so they don’t touch. She puts her huge purse on the seat between her and the man, also a little piggishly. Then a woman comes along and wants to sit in the other window seat, the one next to me, with one empty seat between us. She asks if the briefcase is mine and I say no. The man across from her says it’s his and doesn’t move it or offer to move it. How selfish! The woman doesn’t ask him to move it either and rides awkwardly on the (slightly) raised area between the window seat and the middle seat next to me. How meek! I resist the temptation to tell the man to be a gentleman and the woman to grow a spine.
(Of course they may each have had reasonable reasons for their behavior.) So here come the prompts:
• Write a scene from the childhood of each passenger that suggests how they became their future adult selves.
• He is King Oogu the Terrible, ruler of the kingdom of Ploog (or more serious names), and she is a member of a rebel group plotting to overthrow him. Write a scene. How will her meekness play out? How will his selfishness?
• He is Oogu, dictator of a small republic. She is a diplomat given the task of reforming him. Write a scene.
• As young people, they oppose each other on their school debating team. Pick a debate topic you know something about. Write a debate with him winning; then rewrite it with her winning.
• They’re in high school. He asks her to the junior prom. Write what happens.
• Both are fleeing the devastation caused by Queen Ooga the Awful. He’s the son of a peasant, she the daughter of a scholar. Circumstances throw them together, both in danger. They will survive only if they cooperate. Write a scene.
• Invent any other situations you like for these two.
Have fun and save what you write!
Era says:
"I can think in my head of almost exactly how I want it to end but I can never get it out on paper."
I am the exact same way. I find that if I know every detail of how the story will end, it isn't as much fun because there is no freedom for my mind to play with the story anymore. I have to remind myself that no one is forcing me to keep that ending, and that I am free to test out new ending ideas I have. If I don't like them, I can always go back to the original ending. Maybe allowing your endings some flexibility will make them more enjoyable, Erica. 🙂
Rina says:
I have a number of unfinished stories and a number of finished. It all comes out pretty good in the end, in my opinion. And the important thing I've figured out, I think, is this: even if I get the feeling "this is a bad story" I try to finish it anyhow if I can. My tastes may not be everyone's tastes, and I can always revise later.
gailcarsonlevine says:
This is welliewalks' comment posted to my guestbook: Here's my comment for your blog!
Good post. I think I struggle with this too, in a different way. I can get stuck but have some ideas going around, just not knowing how to connect them. Then I sometimes just get scared that I'll wreck it or whatever… My mom says I am writer that works best on a deadline (NaNowWriMo was great for me- and I write best at night, before sleep. I'd stay up for a long time writing if I could…). I love the prompts!
Also, I got The Wish from the library book sale today! I've read it before and I'm glad to have it!
April says:
What fun prompts! Your names for the piggish man made me laugh.
I often struggle with unfinished-itis. My problem is similar to Era's, in that I like repeating scenes in my head and don't want to commit them to paper in fear that it'll be final. My characters are generally human in nature (regardless of their actual race), and like most humans, aren't completely predictable. So the same scene won't play out exactly the same way each time I go through it in my head. Generally, the more times I play out a scene, the better it gets. So I'm afraid of writing it out… what if that version is not the best it could have been?
I need to just write stuff, and then go back and change it later if I have a better idea. But I have trouble doing that.
Elizabeth says:
I agree with April that I play a scene in my head again and again and gets better each time… except when I write it out on paper. Sometimes it loses its juiciness and some of the details that had made it so good before.
I also have many ideas that I've started, but they have never gone anywhere. For me I think I need to get past a certain part in the story to know where its going or that it's going to work before I fully want to commit to it. That's just me anyway.
I also have a wonderful book suggestion that is really good about not having perfect characters, really good at distinguishing characters and is a perfect example of torturing your characters. It's called The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. It's about a 14 year old girl in 1964 who runs away from home and her harsh and neglecting father. She goes with Rosaleen who is there black housekeeper which causes some racial problems. It is an amazing book to to use to look at the craft, but it is also a wonderful story.
Clare says:
I have the same problem. I'm currently working on THREE books, with countless stall-outs sitting lonely in notebooks or Word documents. Very frustrating…I often fall madly in love with one story and than another, abandoning the last one. Its like speed-dating: exhausting and fruitless. This is really great advice, and I LOVE your writing prompt :).
Also: NaNoWriMo is epic! I did it for the first time last year and won, but I didn't end up liking my story hardly at all. But it was very fun, and I am totally doing it again :). Do you do NaNoWriMo yourself?
gailcarsonlevine says:
Clare–I am much to slow for NaNoWriMo, but I'm lost in admiration for people who do it.
ToNature says:
Wonderful post! I love all your prompts and am actually working on a story based off of an older one about coming up with an opposite-self. So much fun!
I had a question regarding POV. I couldn't find you addressing this problem in other blogposts, but if you have and I just missed it, I'd gladly read it. I usually write from first person but I decided for a new story I'm working on (the alter-ego one, actually) that I would try to use third person. My problem is that though I'm writing about a person, my story sounds more like a dry biography than anything. I've read excellent books from 3rd person and have found it just as easy to get to know a character as when an author writes from 1st person, but I'm having trouble doing this myself. Do you have any suggestions?
Thank you, and Clare-NaNoWriMo writer? Awesome! I'm trying it for the first time this November… looking forward to it.
Sophie says:
Great post! I liked the prompts; they made me laugh 🙂
@ToNature: It might help you to do a little journaling in the character's first-person voice, just to help you get inside their head. People's thoughts and personalities often bleed into the way they perceive things, so getting to know your character's voice may help you talk about them in the 3rd person, so to speak. I've found that that often helps me realize non-narrating characters.
I love Nanowrimo! I did it last year and also won, but my favorite part of it was the sense of community i had with other Wrimos, even though I knew almost none of them. Oh, and the forums. Those were hilarious!
Jenna Royal says:
"Finishing is the first step toward exposing your work to criticism and even rejection in the sometimes cold, cruel publishing world. Your fingers may curl into fists at the prospect, and fists can’t type."
I loved that! I used to have a terrible time finishing stories. Lately, I've limited myself to just one at a time and not allowed myself to start a new project until I've finished the ones already started. I can drag all I want, but that nice juicy idea I came up with last week has to sit tempting me on a shelf in my mind until I finish the project already started. I don't always commit right away – but I've made a decision within the first couple chapters.
It's finishing editing that I have a problem with, actually. I find it unbelievably daunting, when I start to think about it. If I don't think and just write, I can usually pull it off. I think it's staring at a whole, 300+ page manuscript and thinking "Where to begin?" that really gets me.
Also, I loved the scenes you imagined for the two passengers sitting with you – I have a habit (not always a good one) for imagining scenarios involving complete strangers. It's so much fun to think of how they ended up the way they did!
I'm a NaNoWriMo-er as well. I do the young writer's version because I don't think I have the time or stamina to do 50,000 words in 30 days. I loved the experience of writing, writing, writing, but after I'd finished, I couldn't latch onto another story until February (I do love the new story, but I hated the wait for it.) It's not that I didn't have ideas, either – it's just that I felt like my creative energy was kind of sapped. How do I keep writing come December?
Limegreen says:
I find this blog very useful. Whenever I get in a terrible writing slump I come here and it helps a lot.
I find that most of the stories I don't finish are because I just start writing. I jot down some random beginning to a story and get a random idea for the story. However, when I do that, I have no idea where the story is going and the plot putters out after a few pages or so. But I also can't seem to find a good way to outline my stories. I either over plot it and have no fun with the story, or I under-plot and my story putters out too. Any advice on how to fix that?
gailcarsonlevine says:
This is from Jill on my guestbook: Hey I was wanting to reread a blog post but I can't find it. It was about when you get stuck and you come up with different ways to go with a story. I can't find it anywhere! I am really stuck right now on my story not knowing where I want to go. Do you know where it is?
-I couldn't post on the blog 🙁
Jill–I'm not sure. Could it have been "Keeping On Keeping On" of 1/20/10?
ToNature–Sophie's suggestion sounds excellent. I'm also adding your question to my list, and I'll see if I can come up with additional ideas.
Limegreen–I'm adding your question too, but in the meanwhile other posters may have suggestions.
Clare says:
@Limegreen: Same problem! Randomness can really put a damper on ones writing skills…you get all hyped up about this random story, but it never gets anywhere. I don't think thats always a BAD thing…I look on it as good writing practice (you can always pick it up again later), and never give up. 🙂
Clare says:
@Sophie: Ditto! That was really incredible…I felt such a great sense of solidarity with my fellow writers :). The only mistake I made was getting into a religious debate with another person, but I learned a lot and still had a blast 🙂
nauli says:
i am also writing a book and i love to write but it just seems boring after page 58. and let me just say you are the best writer i ever found.