Hiatus

[Ihe]

Another post here has piqued my interest in this, so here's a question to all Chrons: with your unfinished stories, what's the longest hiatus time you've taken before revisiting it (to keep working on it or to finish it)? I ask because I myself have let an unfinished story of mine fester for 3-4 years now, and I don't know if I'll ever build up the courage and inspiration needed to go back to it. Also: at what stage of the story did you abandon it? Maybe there's a statistically significant figure there.

 

[Vaz]

My first unfinished WIP that I was writing before joining Chrons will be getting a visit in the next few months. Its a mess as I had no idea what I was doing, but I left it at around the half way point.

Been over a year since I've laid eyes on it.

 

[prizzley]

I'm currently working on something I started aeons ago. When I gave up on it, it was rubbish with hints of better writing.

Several years ago I dug it out, decided I could save it, and got longlisted in a novel writing competition. But I couldn't get an agent interested in it.

A few months ago I polished up the first few chapters and entered another competition. While waiting to hear I'm ruthlessly editing/rewriting the rest. I have hopes for it.

I recommend checking out old unfinished wip. It may be sad and useless, better than you remember, or have a storyline, characters and scenes that can be salvaged. Try it. Good luck!

 

[HareBrain]

I've had the first few chapters of a story on hiatus for about eight years (apart from a tiny bit of tinkering and showing it to a few people). I still plan to do something with it.

 

[tinkerdan]

My first novel published around 2012 is based around two books I did in the early 1980's and then put aside. Someone else got them out and asked why I hadn't finished them. So somewhere around twenty years or more I was encouraged enough to decide to rewrite them.

 

[Ihe]

The person that dug them out is a hero then.

 

[AlexH]

I started writing stories about 12 years ago, and I've recently been going back to the early ones. They were finished, but needed a little honing. Somehow, a couple of them are among my best!

 

[J Riff]

Late in 1978, I had this idea, see, for a SF blockbuster...

 

[The Storyteller]

I have put dozens of stories aside that were in their first chapters, mostly because I had a different project I was focusing on. I've let them sit years, and have since picked them up and written a few more chapters, or done a bit of brainstorming, and then put them aside once more.

For bigger, more significant projects, I have a few different scenarios. I have two or three from when I was in school that I wrote hundreds of pages on and did a lot of brainstorming, but ended putting them aside for 'simpler' projects. A few of them I doubt I'll ever pick back up, because I've grown out of them.

Then I have my two 'big ones'. By big, I mean the ones I have spend the most time on, written the most pages, and completed the most drafts.

My current WIP (Mulgrin's Quest) I started when I was in high school, but only wrote a chapter. I let it sit for probably 3-4 years before picking it up and writing a full draft. Then I let it sit another year (I think) and picked it up again, at which point I started working on it seriously and making actual writing goals and deadlines with it. I got so discouraged with it last September that I was hardly able to write at all, and in November I realized I needed some distance and I put it aside. I picked it up promptly after Christmas, and have been going strong since.

The other one was started when I was in grade 10. It was meant to be a 'simple' story, but every time I wrote the thing, it got longer and longer and more and more complicated. Soon it grew into a mammoth epic fantasy, which I doggedly worked at for years. I got really caught up in world building, (attempting a language, maps, histories of separate nations, kingdoms, politics, magic, etc.) and time-lining future and past events.

At some point I realized that this project was a little too ambitious for my current level of skill, and I put it aside, choosing to shift focus to Mulgrin's Quest. It's probably been a few years since I've worked on it, and it will be many years yet before I pick it up again. However, even if a decade or more goes by, this story is very near and dear to my heart, and I have no doubt I will pick it up again.

I feel that any story can be picked up again. There have definitely been things I haven't touched for 5-7 years that I still plan on picking up again. Sometimes I just randomly have the impulse to work on a project I had almost forgotten I started. You never know when inspiration will strike!

 

[Ihe]

At some point I realized that this project was a little too ambitious for my current level of skill, and I put it aside,

That's something I've stumbled upon as well. My "main big story" has been collecting dust for a while exactly because of that: my current level of skill and experience wouldn't do it justice at the moment, IMO. Aah, the pitfalls of ambition...

 

[Steve Harrison]

The publisher of my novel called for short stories from his stable of authors for a new SF/speculative anthology, so I dusted off and tidied up a story I wrote 25 years earlier and sent it off. And I do mean dusted, as it was a yellowed, curled-up manuscript in a box in the attic. It was accepted and published in the collection. Finally!