Restart Blues

[stormiel]

Does anyone else tend to get 10-30k words into the story then scrap it and start over? Almost every story I've tried to write has had this problem. This time I've worked out the plot first but I'm really hoping not scrap it when I get a third of the way in.... What do you all do when your tempted to scrap your work and begin again?

[Kessie]

Sounds like you have trouble when you hit the Big Swampy Middle. Here's some of Jim Butcher's advice on that:

The middle of books is HARD, especially for beginning writers. Why? Because the middle of a book gives you the most flexibility in terms of telling your story. The beginnings and ends of stories share many similar demands, craftwise, but the MIDDLE is where your personal style has room to play. IE, there are a berjillion-and-one different things you can do in the middle of a story, and since you're a beginning writer, about a berjillion of them are probably the wrong things to do.

It's like a swamp. There are apparent paths all around you--but sometimes the ground that looks solid actually sucks you under and paralyzes you and strangles you. Sometimes the water that looks deep and unpleasant is actually shallow and safe. Sometimes apparent paths aren't paths at all--they just wander all over and wind up at a dead end. Sometimes the safe-looking waters are teeming with alligators and poisonous snakes just below the surface.

Man. The middle of a book is /dangerous/.

It's when an author starts getting lost that the book's middle becomes the Great Swampy Middle. Once you've taken a wrong turn in the GSM, you've got to be smart about which way you move, because if you just keep wandering around, you (and by "you" I mean "your story") is just going to keep bumbling around in circles and never get out of the GSM.

Those of you who have written this much of a book already know exactly what I'm talking about. You hit that point where you're not sure what to do next--when small details and points of logic start tripping you up. Where your story begins to veer off from your outline, and feel fairly confident that it's never, EVER going to veer back. You aren't sure where things went wrong, exactly. Characters and situations start popping out of your fingers as if of their own volition. They're often fun, even intriguing, but they're really a form of denial, you poor deluded, benighted sap. You're lost. You just don't want to admit it to anyone, least of all yourself.

News flash: the reader is going to get that, and it's going to kill their fun. Readers are not stupid. They have a surprising amount of insight, even if they don't always consciously work out why something seems to be wrong with the story. Many readers, God bless every one of them, will plow ahead through the swamp, trusting you to get your act together eventually.

But most won't have that kind of patience. You'll lose them.

(That's bad.)

But I say unto you, fear not. For though the GSM be all around you, there are ways to escape its fearsome grasp. I'll share my own favorite methods with you, and go over several other techniques and tips, and finish off with the WMD (Weapon of Middle Destruction) which can snickersnack that GSM monster back into the slivy toves with 100 percent reliability.

Here we go:

The problem with GSMs is that most writers don't have a very good idea of exactly where they want to go. I mean sure, they want to get "to the other side of the swamp," but that's sort of like saying "I want to get to the other side of the continent." It's a good plan, as stated, but it lacks clarity, specificity, definition. Instead of saying "the other side of the continent" it might be more helpful to say something like "I'm taking I-70 out through the midwest to Denver, then hopping on Highway Suchandsuch southwest through the Rockies before taking Route Whatever across California to the Pacific."

Same thing applies in the story. If you have a good idea of your next landmark, waypoint, stepping stone, what have you, it's a lot easier not to fall off the path and get sucked down into the mud. SO. One way to help yourself do that is to create something to help you keep on track--a structure specifically designed to keep the pace of your book strong throughout the middle. My favorite such construct is called THE BIG MIDDLE.

(Go here for the rest: jimbutcher.livejournal.com/1865.html )

[rjj7]

I've been in a very similar situation, and still technically don't have proof that I've left it. When I first started writing, I'd read probably a dozen books on how to write. I'm super analytical about this sort of thing, and went into it well prepared.

I was awful anyway.

My first story attempts never even made it past a few pages. I'd start writing and would quickly realize that nothing coming out of the fingertips was the slightest bit fit for human consumption. NOT the cat's pajamas, if you take my meaning. However (queue music indicative of sage advice), the important thing isn't how far you get, it's what you take away from it. I sat down and analyzed each and every one of those failed starts to figure out why they were so awful. Short answer: I had rushed into the story too fast without establishing setting, characters, or even mood.

Armed with this realization, I went back and planned my opening scene ahead of time, wrote some more, and joy and rapture, got several chapters in.

Nope. Still lousy.

So I once more analyzed the problems. When once I figured it out (in this case, it was the reverse problem; I got three chapters in without even clearly establishing what the conflict of the story was going to be), I planned some more and went back to square one.

The point of this long, boring story (thanks for humoring me) is that by this time I've scrapped almost a dozen stories, two of which had broken 60K words. But I'm not in the least discouraged, because in each case, I was able to figure out precisely and definitely why I scrapped them. I was then able to avoid that pitfall in the next version by restructuring and replotting portions, trimming away dead weight, streamlining the introduction of new material, creating conflict where previously there was none, and generally doing all the things that I should have done before I started. Each draft is longer than the last, and I rarely make the same type of mistake twice (at least, the glaringly obvious kind that's draft-scrap-worthy; I repeat the humbler kind at least thirty-seven times a day )


So I guess my advice for you is to look at each draft and figure out what is wrong with it and why you scrapped it. Was it because of lack of conflict/tension? I had to scrap a 40K draft because I discovered that after my first chapter, I didn't have a single scene that could be described, even charitably, as moderately gripping. Is it because of a lack of information? I once had a draft where nothing remotely interesting was happening to the main character, and I realized it was because he had no clue what was going on, and therefore wasn't really a participant in the struggle. Is it lack of direction? Do you have enough characters to make your setting feel like it's full of people? Is your story hanging in a vacuum? There's any number of things that can go wrong with a story, and though I've learned to recognize a few, I am quite confident that I'm going to continue smacking up against more of them in the future.


As a final anecdote (yes, sorry, I'm far to ready to share those), I am currently outlining my story all over again before taking the plunge. Eventually, it will be a scene-by-scene outline, although at the moment it's a good deal more general. As I was looking at it, I realized that there was a large section of the book that had no purpose. My characters were traveling from point A to point B. I couldn't really just skip over that part, since it was through enemy territory, and it wouldn't make any sense for nothing to happen (not to mention it would severely damage the reader's view of my villains), so I'd just thrown in some random action/adventure. But in the grand scheme of things, none of that mattered to anything. If I had dispensed with outlining and begun writing, I can tell you exactly what would have happened: I'd have gotten up to this point and then stuck. After muddling around for a while getting nowhere, I would have scrapped the draft, analyzed my mistake, and then set about fixing it. Thank God for outlines!

[if you're curious, the final solution ended up involving the creation of a new character, modifications of all previous sections to incorporate the arrival, the relocation of a pivotal, pre-existing character, and a slow build-up to a mini-climax where one of the characters loses something extremely important. This section now has a solid reason for being in the book, and I anticipate no problems when I finally get round to writing it.]



TL:DR; Figure out why you scrap your drafts and outline sufficiently to avoid making the same category of mistake all over again is my advice.

[Kessie]

Or write something shorter you know you can finish. Dragonlots is always soliciting short stories on here, about 6000 words. That's a great way to hone your skills.

Well, that and fanfiction. :-)

[Kristen]

Hey, I've written whole books and then started over again. It's part of learning how to write. Pantsers don't like to hear this, but outlining can really help with that sagging middle syndrome. Took me years...OK, decades...but when I finally embraced The Power of the Outline, my writing improved tremendously. So much easier to get where you're going if you know the waystations along the route.