Young Writers Society

I was writing my novel just now when I looked up and thought "this story sucks".

I'm begining to understand why: Everything is already carefully planned out - from character's relationships with each other to descisions they will make. The characters aren't developed, and the few things that I made up about them are pathetic and just don't work.

I'm thinking about scraping the novel entirely. Every time I think about it, I hate it more. Considering I made it up when I was in 3rd grade, that makes sense.

I just am thinking about it so hardly, and I really am torn by this.

Writing is a personal thing, so when you come to hate your writing, you do exactly the same thing when you come to hate a person; that is, you take a break from it. Just leave it alone for some time until you're ready to go back and apologize to your story. If you never feel ready to apologize, then that tells you that maybe it's time to start seeing other stories. After playing the game for a while, you might find a story that you want to settle down with, and that's when things get serious.

In other words: take a break. Leave it alone. If you find yourself lacking the motivation to go back to it, then start a new project. If you don't like that project, then start another one, and another one, and another one, until you find one that you do like.

It's interesting to see it compared to dating, but I suppose it's an accurate analogy. We do have very personal relationships with our stories and sometimes we try one that simple isn't right for it. In your case, I think it also comes down to confidence. Have people read it and told you it's bad or is that just your opinion? As well, under developed characters are not something to scrap a story for. That is one reason we do rewrites: to make the characters better.

It's natural to start to detest your writing, especially if you've spent a very long time on it.

You have two options; rewrite it and see if it gets better, or scrap it. But if you really, really start to hate it (i.e. can't stand to even work on it any more) I'd personally just give up. There's no point writing something you don't enjoy, unless you think it's really worth it.

If it's worth it, you'll feel better upon the rewrite, if you don't and you still continue to feel it's rubbish, I'd try and move onto something else for a bit. You can always come back to it if you feel it's the right time, and you might find that the next thing you turn to is by far superior and more enjoyable.

Is it the story that you hate, or the writing?

If you feel really strongly about a story or plot, I'd say keep working on it. Sometimes there are little things about the plot or the characters that you might not like, so just take a minute, brainstorm, and see if you can find a way to fix something or change something. You have no idea how many times I went back to change my plot while I was writing my novel.

While I was writing, there were times that I felt really discouraged and I just hated my writing, but I was passionate about the story and I truly felt the story idea was strong, so I just kept going. Sometimes we second-guess ourselves and we only begin to see all of our mistakes. Sometimes you just begin to feel as though you suck at writing, just keep telling yourself that it is only a first draft, and just keep writing the story, worry about perfecting it later, when you've finished.

It's also good to take a break from the work once in a while, because you can literally get sick and tired of it.

If you don't love your story or your characters and you don't feel as though you can invest all your time on it, maybe it's time to start on another idea?

Just remember never to delete anything that you've written, no matter how bad.

If you feel you can't do anything with the story anymore, and feel like you're just filling up pages, then leave it alone. Don't delete it, maybe you'll change your mind one day, but stop writing if it doesn't feel right. It's hard when you have an idea, and picture the novel finished, and build your hopes up, it's hard to realize it doesn't work. But even if you try to ignore that fact, it reflects in your writing. And that's always bad.

Thanks, guys. I've decided to just take a break for it, then come back to it later, develop the characters, change the plot around to fit them, and keep on going. I have other projects going at the same time anyway, so I'll just do those. I know, most people don't work on multiple things at once, but it's how I work. One of my favorite authors does it too(Avi).

Is it the story that you hate, or the writing?

It's more the combination of the plot and characters. See, everything was planned out, i.e. relationships with each other and descisions they will make, but those things clashed with the few traits I had decided on for the characters, but they were still flat and...do you get the ide?a?

Thunder dude, I'm with you all the way. However I will make one statement that can be interpretated any way you want. The reason that you hate your work so much, and that it hurts, is because you love it. Treat it well. Has it not treated you well during the hard times?

And never give up. We are the writers who finish the hard slog, and that is who has the spirit worthy of getting published. No artist has not suffered from this.

Thanks. I'll definetly come back to it, but for now, I'll try and finish the first draft of one of my other novels.

Everyone summed it up pretty well. I got so frustrated some years ago because I couldn't get this one story to work. I buried it for dead and walked away. Three years later I had an amazing opportunity to revisit it, and expand it. Suddenly, everything started clicking and I was able to not only finish it, but make it the best it could be.

Take a break and come back. Life is long with many experiences that shape your opinions. One day you might see why your story does not work the way it needs to, or maybe you will take the good from what you wrote and transform it into a different story that you are working on.

Good luck.

Listen to the others.

In the mean time, try writing short stories. It feels great to finish a piece of writing, and maybe that's what you need? If you've been writing a novel for a long time, you probably haven't finished anything for quite some time.

And I personally find that character charts do *not* work. The characters have to come alive in your writing. Use your characters in short stories (maybe that have nothing to do with the plot?) and just see how they naturally speak and interact with each other. You'll be amazed at what happens naturally - I once gave a character a weird accent, and it wouldn't be complete without it. I wouldn't have chosen this in an outline, though. (Haha, the character was a left-coiled tubeworm. Some strange assignment when my Language Arts teacher decided to connect to the Science department.)

Good luck, and remember: writing should be fun. It's not a job (yet!)

~JFW1415

Good idea, JFW1415. I have tried character charts every so often, but I always just get angry at them because they're so boring and stop.

What you need to do is go through them and pick and choose what elements of a character chart you want to use. I'm the same way with character charts, but they do help with figuring out the basics of the characters.

For my last set of character profiles, I created a very simple character chart.

Name: Obvious reasons for including this one, .

Age: Same as above.

Hair: Can also be melded into one group of appearances.

Eyes: Same as above.

Family: Can be the start of creating a real character, even if it's something as simple as two normal parents, who are also in the same field of work. Family is what formed this character, although you don't have to get into too much detail about said family. Just get an idea of who they were, and how they influenced the character.

Education, also including current career: Another thing that formed the character into what he or she is, but another thing where you don't have to give too much detail to. Did he or she finish high school and college? Then, what they are currently doing for work. This could be something that defines them, or something as vague as 'works in an office.'

Info: This is whatever else you want to include about this character, almost like a character sketch. How is your character going to react about the plot? What traits does this character have? Is there a specific event that made the character into what he or she is, besides family and education? Is his or her pet horse and important part of the story?

And so on, whatever is important for that character gets included here. Ideas, feelings, and added detail from something mentioned before. The best part about having the general 'info,' though, is that you can keep adding to it. You don't have to figure it all out at once.

Another thing to do, which I always have to do, is just write them. Now, I know that right now you're taking a break from the story, so you might not want to do this at the moment. But, writing a few thousand words helps me find out who the characters are. The details that I've written down in the character chart helps me to get an idea of who they are in my head, but I never know who they truly are until I write them.

Wow, that got kind of long... But, it's something that I've found always gets around my boredom with character charts. Hope that it will help, .

I'm not going to post a wall of text like the others, because I'm sure everything important has been said. Though I'd just like to add that I was forcing myself to write a story- trying desperatly to make it work and when I read the actualy story, it was awful. So I left it and tried a different story I had been thinking of and I truly believe I found the right one. Touch wood, of course