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Young Writers Society


Scrapping Novel Ideas(?)



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Fri Jun 09, 2017 9:31 pm
Snazzy says...



I write poetry sporadically, and sometimes dabble with short story ideas. However, novel writing gets me.

I have started too many beginnings of novels to count. I think at least 4 made their way to YWS. Some of them only made it like 2 chapters, and some I've reached up to 20 chapters and past the 50,000 word count (NaNo '15 - yay!). However, after NaNo madness ends, or I drop out of LMS, I don't work on them much.

My main concern is with one of my longer starts on my novel, Blotted Out. It's not my longest, but it's probably one of my favorites. I'll sometimes just look back at my prologue and previous chapters and think "wow, I was actually going somewhere with this". But the more I wrote it, the less confident I felt. It started becoming cliche, and although I knew where I wanted to go with it, I didn't know how to get there. Then I panicked and added in this really stupid love triangle that was also super cliche, and it just made it worse. I'll pick it up after a year of not writing, and then set it back down again for another 4 months, and then try and write again, and it's all just really exhausting. Part of me wants to start a novel fresh, and part of me is screaming at me to keep working on Blotted Out.

So all of that to ask this: when is it time to scrap a novel idea? Or maybe a better question, when shouldn't you scrap an idea?
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Fri Jun 09, 2017 9:48 pm
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Vervain says...



Question: Have you thought of making it a novella instead?

Novellas are shorter (10k to 50k words) and don't have to stand up to the multiple plots and extended plot lines of novels. Personally, I just made a switch from writing novels to novellas because -- while I like writing longform fiction -- I felt novels were just too big for me to tackle all at once. I feel a lot less stress writing novellas because they're more condensed and cut out the side plots of novels. They cut to the chase.

You don't necessarily have to scrap it to change it into a form that's more workable and attainable for your style.

However, I would recommend saving it even if you don't work on it any more at all. It may feel cheap and cliche now, but 10 years down the road you may look at it and know exactly where to bring it. Or, 10 years down the road, you may look at it and decide then to scrap it.

I have a few persistent ideas that I've been working on for years. Specifically, I have two that I've been rewriting since late 2011 -- that's almost 6 years. I'll take a year or so off of writing them, then go back with new ideas for plots and character points, and then I'll set them down again when I get tired of them.

But it's comforting to know that if I ever draw a blank on something else, I can always go back and work on Retaliation or ITAOS, because they're ideas that I'm not necessarily focused on finishing -- I'm more focused on writing them. There are so many cool ideas I've implemented in them only to scrap in the next partial draft, and it helps me get out some of my "ooooh a shiny idea!" syndrome.

In the end, I think it's up to you. You don't have to finish it right now, but you don't have to get rid of it entirely.
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Mon Jun 12, 2017 4:10 am
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Rosendorn says...



Honestly, my biggest advice is to get used to that discomfort.

First drafts are bad. Beginnings are good because you have a clear idea of what the voice and characters are their strongest. Beginnings are what come to us first, usually, and they set the tone for everything we want the story to look like.

Middles are generally ?????? to every author, and you don't learn how to construct a middle without writing a lot of middles. Endings can be an even worse ????????? with maybe some !!! thrown in there, because, again, you have to practice endings.

So, to gain practice and motivation:

Daydream instead of write. Start to daydream your middles, your endings. Mentally toy around with ideas just to get a vision for the general feel you want the middle and ending to be. This general feel is your guidepost for actually writing.

A to B plotting. I call this the carrot method, because you are basically dangling really cool scenes you've daydreamed about in front of your nose to keep writing.

Creating a general purpose and outlining the overreaching meta for the story. This, again, acts as a guidepost for how to slot all your ideas together. If you decide you want to completely subvert a standard plot cliche, build your story around that.

Basically, practice tinkering stories in your head so you can build up the same clarity and conviction of a beginning. You won't learn how to write middles and endings unless you write middles and endings, so learning how to daydream about them in a way that stays true to the story is an important skill.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

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