Your longest failure

[THBGato]

A film script for a rom-com set at Glastonbury festival. I was writing it in the 00's. Got about 80 pages written but never quite finished it... life, and the realisation of how hard it would be to get it off the ground, got in the way.

 

[NaughteeDragon]

30k words. The problem is I don’t know where to publish it, so I haven’t done anything else with it. I want to write it, I think it will be really interesting.
A teenage boy (14-15) is socially awkward and isolated due to his abusive father, who was recently killed by the boy’s mother. He lashes out and gets suspended from school, so enrolls online, further retarding his social growth.
His mother meets a couple that plays D&D and they invite her to join their home game. The boy gets involved in a game run by the couple’s son. The young man takes the boy under his wing and uses the 7 knightly arts to help the boy socially mature as his character becomes a squire to another character. He also develops a massive crush on the GM’s cheerleader/physics club president sister.
The mother becomes romantically involved with the wife of the couple and enters a poly relationship. She also finds out the adults’ D&D club hosts occasional swinger parties.
The third plotline is the story of the two campaigns that take place in the same world and how they occasionally overlap. (Not in a sexual way)

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'm in rather a buoyant mood at the moment because I've just finished a complete first draft of a 60kish novel which I started three years ago. Once I'd decided to cast aside doubt and stick to my original outline (more or less) it was amazing how I managed to get the last quarter written within the space of a week (my continuous prose sucking in and occasionally spitting out the various fragments I'd written over the past 36 months).

 

[OralAllOver]

I have a screenplay set during French Revolution .... it's taking longer that the revolution and, cant help but feel, some lil Napoleon will wipe it out

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

My unfinished Kyra and the Swordtress series has about 60k word published. There’s 160k words sitting in my draft folder with no end in sight, and I’m too afraid to open it up right now.

I’m one of those reasons people say don’t publish a series until its finished lol

 

[StrentWriter]

I think I’m living mine, but that’s okay

Actually my greatest failure was a history book whereby some evidence turned up a year later that proved me entirely wrong. Was a very humbling experience!

 

[millamomud]

29k Words, 9 Chapters and it's not even halfway done.

A slow burn bdsm narrative about a semingly vanilla couple.
Infertility has hollowed out the couple's routines, so they sublet their spare room, unaware how their lives are going to change. The new tenant is calm, composed, and quietly dominant, a contrast that touches the protagonist more deeply than she admits. Small gestures become invitations, then temptations. The apartment turns into a space where boundaries blur and a slow, intimate power shift takes hold.

 

[cw5523729]

You wrote a 110k word novel in... two months?

I know! I wrote 169k words and it took me 2 friggin' years!

At 250 words per every 10 minutes, it takes 4400 minutes to write 110K. That is 3 days, 1 hour, and 20 minutes.

With a constant writing speed I see that possible. I've done 50K in less than 30 days; 110K would take me twice the time personally speaking.

damn, I feel like a serious slacker now.

I mean, I am a serious slacker and knew it, but now I really, really feel it.

 

[crookedletter]

Yeah, thereabout. It helps that I have no life. Hah.

Well there are much worse ways to have no life.

For what it's worth, related to your "wasted" two months, I wrote a (non-erotic) novel -- much shorter and took me much longer than you -- and put it away for a couple months, and then read through it. It's a mess. But I don't see it as a failure or a waste of time. With a work of that length I would expect to need heavy revisions, if not outright rewrites. Even if you're a plotter, the work is likely to change as you go. First drafts are allowed to suck.

I'm currently in the process of rewriting the damn thing. It's daunting, but I think it will be worthwhile.

Maybe your project is different in your mind, maybe you don't see anything salvageable in it. Or maybe you just don't want to work on it anymore. Just saying, though: maybe the issues you're seeing with the novel are fixable.

And at your rate of output I imagine you can manage it in a few minutes.

 

[cw5523729]

At 250 words per every 10 minutes, it takes 4400 minutes to write 110K. That is 3 days, 1 hour, and 20 minutes.

With a constant writing speed I see that possible. I've done 50K in less than 30 days; 110K would take me twice the time personally speaking.

Wait, that's 3 days writing 24/7. What kind of drugs are the rest of you taking to write non stop for 3 days without sleeping? And why aren't you sharing with me? Didn't your mommies teach you to share?

eta: Actually, I just did the math and the 5.2k words I wrote for the Christmas contest were done in only 3 days. So that's 50k in a month and a 100k in 2 months (if I could have hypothetically maintained that pace.) So I guess that really isn't that unrealistic of a timeline after all.

 

[HordHolm]

Not exactly a failure as such, but something that will never happen...

I had a finished script for a producer (and driving force behind the project) who had put together a director (who was on the verge of being replaced, though he didn't know it), a couple of mid-level European actors signed on, and most importantly, promises of finance. And then the producer died. The project collapsed with his death. It wouldn't have earned me much (low single thousands of dollars), but would have been credit, and we had further ideas.

The industry being what it is, there are thousands of excellent scripts out there and its contacts that count. Someone else tried to resurrect the project, but they didn't have the background that money men or the actors would have faith in.

For anyone interested, the story was a WW2 horror set against the background of German defeat in Poland. It wasn't particularly good - more workaday than anything, but it hit the right beats for the genre.

 

[CalBishForNow]

Longest failure here? I started a story with a certain premise in mind, a rule for the characters and myself to follow, and a one-paragraph hook I liked enough to run with. I got 8,000 words into writing it before I decided that I had no idea how to complete the remaining half of the story (or more) and have it make any sense at all. Maybe someday I'll have an epiphany or repurpose it.

Longest writing-related failure in general? I got 36,000 words into a fantasy/horror novel before deciding I had no idea how to end it or how even to get there. I've reused some of the characters in other things but that overall plot is dead.

Longest failure overall? I don't even know the answer off the top of my head but I'm sure it's too personal to go into here.

You wrote a 110k word novel in... two months?

The National Novel Writing Month goal was 50,000 words in November. What @Ian_Snow is talking about is just a tiny bit more than doing that twice. Personally I've completed the NaNoWriMo challenge once and came within 3,000 words on a second attempt, so I was close.

The goal is definitely not a completed, polished novel, though, just a first draft of some kind of narrative. And I don't mean to minimize the effort. Even getting that many words on the page in that time cut into my sleep and other commitments.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Wait, that's 3 days writing 24/7. What can of drugs are the rest of you taking to write non stop for 3 days without sleeping? And why aren't you sharing with me? Didn't your mommies teach you to share?

Haha, I don't know, the longest work I've written took me over 200 days, but I wrote 50% of that time through 10-minute sessions on my phone. Total time was almost two days. My point is that the total time can be spread out. When I did NaNo this year, I ended up pushing out 18K weekly (tops), and that was spending an average of between 60 to 90 minutes of daily writing.

If you want to know what kind of drugs you need to take to do this, don't ask me, ask John Boyne. He wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days!

 

[Ian_Snow]

Wait, that's 3 days writing 24/7. What can of drugs are the rest of you taking to write non stop for 3 days without sleeping? And why aren't you sharing with me? Didn't your mommies teach you to share?

eta: Actually, I just did the math and the 5.2k words I wrote for the Christmas contest were done in only 3 days. So that's 50k in a month and a 100k in 2 months (if I could have hypothetically maintained that pace.) So I guess that really isn't that unrealistic of a timeline after all.

And you'd be surprised at how fast a novel comes together if you just write a thousand words a day. Thirty days, thirty thousand words. You'd have a 100k novel in just over three months. For me personally, plotting out my longer works ahead of time helps a ton too. If you already know the beats, there's no real struggle to figure out how to connect the dots. But that's not everyone's way of doing it and I get that.

 

[NuclearFairy]

And you'd be surprised at how fast a novel comes together if you just write a thousand words a day. Thirty days, thirty thousand words. You'd have a 100k novel in just over three months. For me personally, plotting out my longer works ahead of time helps a ton too. If you already know the beats, there's no real struggle to figure out how to connect the dots. But that's not everyone's way of doing it and I get that.

Yeah, some days I can write five thousand words, others I'm lucky if I can write five.

 

[Ian_Snow]

Yeah, some days I can write five thousand words, others I'm lucky if I can write five.

It's all forward progress. Those five words are five more than you had yesterday. Better than not creating at all, and with discipline comes confidence. I've slowed down a bit in the last few years but I like the quality of the writing a lot more, a trade-off I'm completely okay with. There's no one speed everyone should write at or a word count to obsess over, you know?

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Yeah, some days I can write five thousand words, others I'm lucky if I can write five.

I struggle with that too, and my solution was to never use wordcount goals. Instead, I just write for how long I decide to write that day. Two hours? An hour and a half? An hour? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Five? One? It doesn't matter. Just spending the time is what matters. Wordcounts fluctuate a lot, but like I said, as long as the wordcount for the day is greater than zero...

 

[NaughteeDragon]

Yeah, some days I can write five thousand words, others I'm lucky if I can write five.

I think my personal record is 30k words in two and a half days. My wife was out of town over a weekend and I came home from work on Friday and started writing. I slept about 4 hours a night and wrote until she got home Sunday afternoon.

 

[Erozetta]

Wait, that's 3 days writing 24/7. What kind of drugs are the rest of you taking to write non stop for 3 days without sleeping? And why aren't you sharing with me? Didn't your mommies teach you to share?

eta: Actually, I just did the math and the 5.2k words I wrote for the Christmas contest were done in only 3 days. So that's 50k in a month and a 100k in 2 months (if I could have hypothetically maintained that pace.) So I guess that really isn't that unrealistic of a timeline after all.

Also, it's called hyper fixation and often includes forgetting to eat or drink as well. *Pats my husband on the shoulder.* He's literally kept me alive while writing more than once!

 

[CalBishForNow]

It's all a matter of how much you plan and edit as you go, or don't. In this thread, people reported their results of a typing test. I averaged the first 10 reported rates of words per minute and got 75.9. (And that's counting some people who reported typing on phones. I'm sure the number would be higher if I excluded those.) Extrapolate that to an hour and that's 4,554 words per hour. Spend one-hour sessions like that daily for 11 days and you've got 50,000 words.

Personally, I think the best I ever managed in an hour was 1,380 words. If I sustained that, it would take me 37 days to reach 50,000.