Slow, slow, slower...

[oggbashan]

I have been writing a story for nearly two years. I started it for Remembrance Day 2018. Like a couple of my stories, it is about the effect of the First World War but this one is dragging. I write a few hundred words and then start on another story, usually a competition entry, and the first story gets shelved.

I've managed a couple of thousand words this month but the plot still has a long way to go.

Do you have stories that stall and are an effort to continue?

 

[NotWise]

I wrote "A Valentine's Day Mess" as a contest entry in 2016. I made a mess of the ending. As a result, readers clamored for "more." I gave it to them. I took almost a year to get part two out, another seven months to get part three out. Part four has been in progress now for more than three years.

It's hard to get my head wrapped around it, but I've made it my goal to complete the last two parts before I do anything else. Now I have to fight off new story ideas all the time.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

I've had one going for over a year now and still can't get it right. I've put out probably a dozen or since I started it, all 25-30,000 words and it still remains almost there but incomplete.

Maybe one day...

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I have 14 entries in my 'Unfinished' folder, some started more than a year ago. Not a one has a real plot. I add to some of them now and then, when a situation for some characters occurs to me, and this leaves me with batches of vignettes that might be worthwhile on their own, but don't add up to anything. Still, that was true of most of the items that eventually made it to my 'Finished' folder, with plots and resolutions showing up eventually (and some of the vignettes getting cast aside). So I try to be patient with those items on which I haven't made real progress yet.

 

[KeithD]

Not usually, no. But I have one now, the sixth in a series of novellas featuring a Washington, D.C., vice detective captive to the vice himself, that has lingered, one chapter done, since January. I keep the chapter open in my Word queue and will get back to it eventually. My idea for ongoing action may have disappeared, though, and I'll have to reimagine what the story is and where to take it. I at least have a chapter written, though, to give me context. I have two more stories just indexed on a list that have been sitting there that long that I'm afraid I'm just going to have to lose. That doesn't happen often with me either. This hasn't come from a period of writer's block, though. The opposite. I've been pumping out stories that played through ones already on the list.

 

[Paul_Chance]

It happens. I usually just trash them. I used to keep them in a "stalled" folder, but I realized I almost never picked them up again. For me, it happens when I lose the thread of a character - but I don't want to abandon the character. I'll take part of the story (a particular scene, a particular character) and toss them over into a document that is basically random story notes. Sometimes they make it back out, but usually in an entirely different context.

 

[Bramblethorn]

"Magnum Innominandum" took about ten years to develop from the first spark to completion. I have several others that have been sitting part-written for years because I lost the impetus.

One of them will probably never be finished, or not without substantial changes, because the world has changed too much since I started on it. Another I no longer need to write, because another author got there first and wrote a character so like the one in my head that the itch has been scratched.

 

[mfan2112]

I have been writing a story for nearly two years. I started it for Remembrance Day 2018. Like a couple of my stories, it is about the effect of the First World War but this one is dragging. I write a few hundred words and then start on another story, usually a competition entry, and the first story gets shelved.

I've managed a couple of thousand words this month but the plot still has a long way to go.

Do you have stories that stall and are an effort to continue?

I had an epiphany the other day on a stalled story that lingered for a while and now on a roll. I hope I can knock a bit off during a flight on Sunday to LA. (Yeah I am traveling in all this mess.)

 

[Erlikkhan]

The second part of "Journey to Oz" was by far the most challenging and slow to finish story of my erotic writing career. The first part was easy to write and stopped before the tornado hit. In it, Dorothy stumbled across Professor Marvel boffing his assistance. He convinced her it was a form of deep magic and taught her the skills she needed to become a "magician's assistant". I wanted part two to follow the movie as closely as possible while keeping the sex hot and the story moving. Coming up with afflictions for the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion that Dorothy could try to cure with her newfound skills was a challenge, as was working in the Munchkins, the Wizard, and the Wicked Whore of the West. It took three or four years of starts and stops, but in the end I was happy with the product and still consider it one of my best pieces.

 

[Thefireflies]

I spent a few months roving around Mars, and even found life there from the very first lines, and there was drama and politics and sex, but alas I became bogged down in the Valles Marineris, not seeing the way out, or more accurately, I couldn’t see an interesting way to move the story along…who knows, maybe I’ll return and look for other ways to get bogged down on Mars again.