When I hit a wall trying to expand my already started stories (Three! ....what was I thinking???) I refuse to be stifled and just open a new .doc file & start spilling out whatever distraction the muse puts in my way to keep me distracted. (sigh)
Finally, mostly out of frustration with how little progress I've made on my three existing tales.... I've posted one of my 'distractions' - a short story called "revisionist history". More to prove that I haven't stopped writing.... just that the muse is filling my head with diversions & distractions while I struggle to bring the three stories I started publicly posting to satisfying conclusions.
So. I'm not just sipping wine and vegging out to 'Succession' on TV. I really do sit at this keyboard and attempt (however vainly) to finish - or at least progress - what I started.
And when I'm blocked..... stuff like Revisionist History comes out instead.
I am not goofing off. I'm just creating unwanted stuff while I struggle to add to the wanted stuff.
:-P
K@
Comments
Three partially finished stories
Only three?
One-Upmanship
I'm going to one-up Ray. Only three? Not thirty?
-- Daphne Xu
wrongs wrong
with thirty? I have many many stories that are not finished because of lack of inspiration to keep them going. When I am inspired I can write a couple thousand words in an hour or so . Case in point the 10k chapters of a very hard choice. I wrote each of those chapters in about 2 hours or less.
Without inspiration/motivation its like meh this is garbage, delete.
garbage and delete
Same here, although I don't delete partial stories. And gods I have quite a few. Often times enough I come back to them, or take some of it and add it to another story. Right now I have at least six I want to come back to, which I will as a circle around and update the current ones I am writing.
Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla clíste.
Broken Irish is better than clever English.
Inspiration and Perspiration
It has been said that genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. One often has to perspire to fill in the details -- dialogue, description, action, reaction, etc. Perhaps it's like the in-betweeners in hand-drawn animation. One doesn't need much inspiration.
And if it's meh, so what? That's what revision is for. (Along with exorcising scenes that don't work and inserting new scenes.) A second editor might help as well.
-- Daphne Xu
OMG I feel SO much better....
Still.... if you saw my desktop, you'd find the other 27 (more or less) I never even dared publicly post until I finished at least SOMETHING! :-)
I can not tell you how much your post relieved my guilt (yet not my obligation to finish what the muse & I started).
K@
I understand.
Bluntly, when I wrote most of my stories, perhaps 2 dozen, I was mostly physically pain free, and if I did get an episode, I had Opiate around, though never abused them.
In this Hell world there are so many distractions, and our President has made me feel very unsafe. At times the pain is so bad, I can't describe it. Will I get back to writing? I don't know? I do understand your frustrations.
Muse musings
Personally I cop out of the unfished story problem by not posting anything but solos (a bit limiting in it's way). Not that I have done much of that either lately.
As always enjoying the ride.
Bru Series
Read through thirty or forty or 4000 chapters, greedily reading one after the other.
The last chapter, after a gap of a month or two, contains one sentence.
The twist.
(Don't claim that you wouldn't do that.)
I confess - In theory you are right
I could very well envisage doing something like that, i.e. sentence you to a long wait for a sentence.
In practise - I'm not THAT kind of writer. It would take far too much effort.
However, in response to calls for sequels I have at times been considering writing a multipart story in the Death in Venice vein: An "actionpacked" slow decent of the protagonist into misery and eventual passing stretching over an endless number of chapters.
Wrap-Up
I'm pretty sure that the last chapter would contain not only the twist, but also the wrap-up or resolution following the twist. For example, as I see it, the twist in "Thumping ❤❤, Broken ❤❤, ❤❤ United" was this line:
Then came a few short paragraphs of reaction and resolution -- or perhaps non-resolution. Granted, it is possible to end with the twist, leaving things to the reader's imagination. For example "In the Blue" ended with:
But that's to be expected with a three-line story. The twist ending of a 4000-chapter story should typically be longer. (I wonder if Angharad is planning some kind of twist ending to "Easy as Falling off a Bike".)
I think that a proper multi-part story should have several twists in the middle, along with a number of cliff-hangers along the way.
But then what do I know? I'm stalled on an order of magnitude more multipart stories than I've completed. I've completed only two genuinely multipart stories, and posted only one here -- the other is probably very unwelcome here, and is at https://www.asstr.org/~Daphne_Xu/. ("Vengeance and Beyond" is properly a solo. I split it only to isolate the potentially-triggering X-rated non-consensual scene, for readers to opt out.)
-- Daphne Xu