Failure of a 10 plus year concept.

[anthorn]

I am coming to realise I have a failure of concept, or story. Despite a very long time writing, a hundred drafts and about 6 or seven finished first novels, I think I might be at the stage where I've come to the point of accepting a failure of concept. Not a failure in my ideas, or story, or ability, or characters, but rather in the story bones itself. It's getting to the point where I'm losing the will, and now when I come up with a idea flash to make it work, I mostly copy and paste what I wrote before and of course, doing that destroys the flow of the story and consistency. I can always write a book one, but past that, that's where it falls apart even though I have a clear vision of where it goes. I always second guess myself, and some of that may be down to planning....but it's time for the end. This is becoming an obsession, and the problem is, I am working on an idea I had in 2009 and my reading habits and writing habits have changed considerably. Back in 2009 I was reading books by Ian Irvine, R Scott Bakker, and Steven Erikson. Now in 2018 I am still reading Ian Irvine, but now Robert Jackson Bennett, a lot of novellas from Tor (The Builders, A taste of honey, and Sorcerer of the wilddeeps (which are godawful) NK jemisin, and Brian Mcclellan. I am not the same person I was in 2009. I am married, I have experienced more things than I ever could have still living at home back in 2009. But the three main points of my story have not changed. The layout of the world, the characters, and how we get from point A to B to C have changed, but not the story. I don't think I can write a story when who I am is different to how I started.

I think this may be, a failure of concept.

 

[Onyx]

I can always write a book one,

What's "a book one"? The first book?

I don't see why it has to be a failure. Write something simple and genuine to your life now, then go back to this older project.

I would agree that copy and paste might be hurting you. Why not just put everything in the correct order, than rewrite it as if you were plagiarizing?

 

[anthorn]

What's "a book one"? The first book?

I don't see why it has to be a failure. Write something simple and genuine to your life now, then go back to this older project.

I would agree that copy and paste might be hurting you. Why not just put everything in the correct order, than rewrite it as if you were plagiarizing?

Yeah, book one as in 1 of 3. I don't know. I think maybe this has become so much of an obsession to me I can concentrate on anything else.

Maybe, I don't know. I could try that.

 

[Onyx]

Yeah, book one as in 1 of 3. I don't know. I think maybe this has become so much of an obsession to me I can concentrate on anything else.

Maybe, I don't know. I could try that.

Just curious, because I've read this kind of thing more than a few times - why are you so focused on a book as part of a series?

"Lord of the Rings" was a single book, divided for publishing purposes. But it is a single story in three chapters. The Dune books are five stories that are related to each other, but each stand on their own.

Is your Book One a complete story or just the first act? Would you and your readers be able to enjoy its publication if the sequels never came out? I guess I'm asking whether book one is a complete work or just a chapter, and you are having trouble finishing a single story, rather than finishing a series.

If I had one complete book I liked, I would try to get that published. You'd certainly get more editorial help with the sequels after that.

 

[Phyrebrat]

2009 is also the year the germ of my idea for my wip came into being.

Reading your post is so eerily similar to the process I went through. And like you, it was too important to me to put aside.

I troubleshooted with the Chrons community again and again, rewriting/copy-pasting and fresh-starting and eventually things started o pull together; it has taken 9 years but I expect it to be finished this Dec (draft 1).

The problem is having a driving passion for that particular story. It doesn’t matter how many people give you the most helpful advice; until you can write it, you’ll feel unfulfilled.

What worked for me was definitely stopping the cut-paste practice, and trusting myself. I stopped slavishly following an idea to the letter, and let it meander a little. That had a cascade effect which helped immensely.

I think you really have to see this through - writing is life, after all and all this is valuable experience.

For me the most valuable lesson was telling myself to relax and know that sooner or later it would work out, and to have faith.

The worst that can happen is the draft is not what you’d hoped. That, though, gives you perspective on what to change. It might be a slow process but it’ll be what the story demands.

Many people would do this differently, but then that wouldn’t be your story, would it.

pH

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Abendau was like this for me and until I got it out I couldn’t move on. The first book is the book I think is my weakest - and maybe I should have trunked it. But book 2 and 3 are, I feel, some of my best books so I’m glad I didn’t.

I do know they were only so much stronger cos I worked on Inish Carraig before they were published and learned loads.

So, maybe, take a break. Work on something else and you can always go back to your first love later.

 

[sknox]

Have you considered a developmental editor?

I understand (and sympathize with) dissatisfaction with the finished product (your book 1), but dissatisfaction is not the same thing as a flawed premise. What has led you to the conclusion that the story is fundamentally broken?

 

[Joshua Jones]

I am not convinced there is such a thing as a fundamentally broken story. There may be an opportunity to improve it, or to build something new from aspects of the current form, but I strongly doubt it is fundamentally broken.

I have been working on my WiP since 2007. It started as an idea to have orbital colonies fighting planetary one, then morphed into the inner planets vs. the outer planets, and has evolved into an intricate universe of many factions on starts roughly 15 ly around Sol. It has evolved substantially over the years, but through each revision, I imported the factions, characters, and tech I liked and rebuild what I felt didn't work. If you really don't think the universe itself can work, try exporting your favorite elements and spin another universe.

That said, to be honest, I think you are torturing yourself and your novel by making Frankenstein's manuscript. I am of the opinion that you nearly never import chapters between universes, because each revision of your universe will have a different feel. That, and having to start over will dissuade you from prematurely redoing your universe, as you will loose all your written work and have to start over from chapter 1.

In the meantime, the writing challenges here are good for taking a break and practice your editing skills. I came to the Chrons specifically for these challenges, and they have made me a much better writer. Also, you have enough posts to post an exerpt into Critiques, and I would be happy to provide whatever feedback I can give. More importantly, some exceptional writers frequent there, so the suggestions may prove invaluable.

Good luck!

 

[tinkerdan]

If I read this correctly::

am coming to realise I have a failure of concept, or story. Despite a very long time writing, a hundred drafts and about 6 or seven finished first novels

You should have at least something close to a finished first novel.
The question arises, do you really have a completed first novel in that is it a complete story. If it is then you should focus on that and polish it to completion.
Then move on to the next book; I take it that you mean that you have something of larger scope that will take several novels.

This is a harder notion to parse out.

Not a failure in my ideas, or story, or ability, or characters, but rather in the story bones itself.

You have ability, idea, characters and story.
But the bones of the story have a problem- I'm not sure you can separate the bones of the story from the story. So either you have a bad story or you don't.

Perhaps it's the glue that puts all the separate pieces together that's the problem.

You might want to write at least one outline for the entire series that will keep you focused on where you are headed and it might become less pressing trying to figure out why it looks like your arrow are all pointing off into disparate directions. Because that's what this begins to sound like.

Write that as if that were one entire story and try to stick with it as you pull each separate story from the whole.

Back in the 70's I started my novel that turned into two novels that were each 200 pages and I knew that it would take more to get to the finish.

It wasn't until around 2000 that I restarted after someone lit a fire under me to get me going. I wrote over 1400 pages that turns out to be around 550k words plus and and finally whittled that down to two novels that were 250k and 190K novels. One of the most insightfull comments made about the first novel was that the reader thought that I was still trying to figure out the story.

Perhaps when you look at your first book that's what you see; you are still trying to figure out the story.

That doesn't necessarily have to stop you if you have a complete story within the first novel and compelling characters and great writing.

Cut and paste can work; however you have to learn to feather the edges so that the reader won't notice where you've done all your overlays.

You need to complete some part of it; because after you get the piece completed it's going to take a while to clean it up and feather the edges and make it perfect.

 

[janeoreilly]

I would say a couple of things: first off, cutting and pasting isn't editing or rewriting, it is cutting and pasting. If things have changed that much then it might be better to set aside what you have and start again from scratch. You know things now that you didn't know when you started working on this project, so perhaps what you have so far is more of a discovery draft than a working draft. Second, after so long working at it, maybe it would be a good idea to set it aside for a while and work on something else. Sometimes ideas need resting time. Can you be more specific about what you've written so far, what it's about, and what you're trying to achieve? That would help in terms of giving you more concrete advice writing wise.

 

[Toby Frost]

I agree with a lot of what's been said. In no particular order:

1) I wouldn't cut and paste, as you run the risk of assembling the story out of bits that you don't feel are very good and of losing the experience of writing the story from start to finish and the flow that results from it.

2) This individual book needs to stand on its own right. I would encourage you not to see it as part of a series but as a novel. I think we are all influenced by the idea of long-running series and huge story arcs, both in books and TV, perhaps to the detriment of the individual story.

3) Perhaps a silly question, but do you have to tell this particular story, and does it have to be from this particular point of view? Would a different story in the same universe work better, or perhaps the same story told by a secondary character or someone completely new?

4) I think very few novels are utterly unsalvagable. The end result might not be Shakespeare, but I think a book would have to be very seriously flawed - perhaps based on something that made no sense or was inherently insulting to the reader - to be completely beyond redemption. Of course, it might be easier and more enjoyable not to salvage it, but that's a different point.

However, none of this makes me think that the story is a failure, as such, just that you've grown tired of it. Perhaps the answer is to do something else for a while, and then to give it another look. You might feel inspired to continue, or you might decide not to, but at least you'll have been working on something new in the meantime.

 

[The Big Peat]

First off, you might be right and it might be better for you to move on. I think that's very important to remember in threads like this where a lot of people want to be all "Have you tried x...". None of us enjoy people giving up on their dreams. However, sometimes we've got to remember dreams change.

Of course, so do stories. Is it possible the story might evolve to meet the person you are now?

A lot of popular authors saw a lot of evolution in their work before it was published.

A lot of them also had some awful first books that never got anywhere and needed dropping.

 

[sknox]

The cautionaries about cut-and-paste are well-advised, but I'll speak up a bit for the defense. My first novel took ten years and significant rewrites. When you have tens of thousands, or a hundred thousand, of words invested in a story, the advice to start over is disheartening, especially to a first-time author. I found myself in very much the same boat as the OP. There was a constant struggle between C&P from already-written chapters--which tended to put my brain back into the very frame I was trying break out of--and writing from scratch. If I did the latter, it only reinforced my "I'll never finish" worries, caused me to look upon weeks or months of writing as "wasted" and, perhaps worst of all, leave behind any good lines or moments in the abandoned piece. Sure, I'd write new ones, but again: for the unpublished, for the never-have-finished, these emotional factors are not to be overlooked.

There's not a good answer. Every choice is fraught, and the only bad option is to quit.

 

[Joshua Jones]

The cautionaries about cut-and-paste are well-advised, but I'll speak up a bit for the defense. My first novel took ten years and significant rewrites. When you have tens of thousands, or a hundred thousand, of words invested in a story, the advice to start over is disheartening, especially to a first-time author. I found myself in very much the same boat as the OP. There was a constant struggle between C&P from already-written chapters--which tended to put my brain back into the very frame I was trying break out of--and writing from scratch. If I did the latter, it only reinforced my "I'll never finish" worries, caused me to look upon weeks or months of writing as "wasted" and, perhaps worst of all, leave behind any good lines or moments in the abandoned piece. Sure, I'd write new ones, but again: for the unpublished, for the never-have-finished, these emotional factors are not to be overlooked.

There's not a good answer. Every choice is fraught, and the only bad option is to quit.

I agree with you. To be honest, my recommendation is partially about avoiding Frankenstein's manuscript and partially about thinking hard before scrapping a story. If the prospect of scrapping means to loose everything, one is more likely to stick with what one has and tweak it, rather than start something new when disaffected by it.

 

[janeoreilly]

The cautionaries about cut-and-paste are well-advised, but I'll speak up a bit for the defense. My first novel took ten years and significant rewrites. When you have tens of thousands, or a hundred thousand, of words invested in a story, the advice to start over is disheartening, especially to a first-time author. I found myself in very much the same boat as the OP. There was a constant struggle between C&P from already-written chapters--which tended to put my brain back into the very frame I was trying break out of--and writing from scratch. If I did the latter, it only reinforced my "I'll never finish" worries, caused me to look upon weeks or months of writing as "wasted" and, perhaps worst of all, leave behind any good lines or moments in the abandoned piece. Sure, I'd write new ones, but again: for the unpublished, for the never-have-finished, these emotional factors are not to be overlooked.

There's not a good answer. Every choice is fraught, and the only bad option is to quit.

I agree it's disheartening, but at the same time I would say that this can be a point at which you make huge progress as a writer. Once you lose the fear of cutting and gain confidence in your ability to replace those words your writing immediately gets better.

 

[sknox]

I hear you, janeoreilly. I was just sympathizing with the first-time writer. It can be overwhelming even to consider.

 

[janeoreilly]

Absolutely, I know when I finished my first manuscript just the thought of having to write the whole thing again would have finished me off. But it wasn't until I began to understand that it was the only way that I made any progress. Now it's just part of the process. (I possibly need a better process).