Dealing with inability to sustain interest in an idea
I frequently have the problem of starting a story with an idea—either one recently conceived or one held in mind for months, even years—only to find it bland or boring after a day or so and abandoning it.
I have developed two partially effective strategy for this:
Finish a story idea as quickly as is possible--usually within the span of a single day. This, however, is conducive to bad pacing and deviation of the final product from the original ideas.
Limited the number of words written each day to no more than 500, this alleviates the pacing problem mostly, but seem to only delay the eventual abandonment rather than prevent it.
What might be some other strategies for such a problem?
In Movies there's the concept of Set Pieces. These are exciting moments in your story you want to hit that will be lavis …
6y ago
TL;DR Writing a complex story can be a lengthy project, use a project management technique—such as Scrum)—to give yours …
6y ago
An idea is not enough. It's abstract and need life to become concrete. If you just focused on your idea while writing, y …
6y ago
The advice is simple. Nail your butt to the couch and type. It won't always be fun, and your first draft will be very …
6y ago
I suspect you are too focused on your idea. Most ideas for good novel length (or series length) stories are actually pre …
6y ago
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An idea is not enough. It's abstract and need life to become concrete. If you just focused on your idea while writing, you will empty it and each word will make it less interesting. You must feed your idea with life to make it entertaining. So, you thought about a story which seems a good idea. You have some characters, required by the story. For the moment, they are abstract, more shadows than people. Give them names. Give them histories and feelings. Let them talk. Let them think and do. Let them surprise you. Nearly the same is truth for places.
Writing is a form of investigation. If you already knew what you will write, it will be boring for sure. You must write to entertain yourself first. It you do not entertain yourself while writing, try to change something, the thing you expect the least to change.
Ideas are to change. Focus on them, and they will remain the same, and become boring after a while. Focus on what they mean for people, and what people mean for them, and they will improve, live, or even die. Ideas are not fun by themselves, but people are when dealing with them.
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In Movies there's the concept of Set Pieces. These are exciting moments in your story you want to hit that will be lavish and engaging, both for you and the reader. Set Pieces can act as mile markers. If you're anything like me, then you don't want to know more than a rough outline of where you are going. A deeper outline will explore the ideas and make them unexciting. So, instead, set up a destination you have to get to in the future and give yourself permission to write poorly to get there. I guarantee if you write 750-1000 words a day you'll have a book at the end of the year. Get excited about that and let your mind hit your targets giving you steady progress towards something. Now the problem with that is your quality might be low, but you will get to the end of it. And then you'll hit the point of struggle I'm dealing with. Once you get to the end, and you've laid down your sword its hard to pick up your scalpel to start working on dead body of a story before you. But, but, but you'll have a finished first draft which is better than you've been doing so far.
I concur that you're problem here is that you're focusing too much on the idea. I think when you get to the end of the first book you're going to be able to see more of your problems than you can from the front end. Possibly weak characterization/motivation, especially if you're all about the idea and not the people. And a few other things. Before you set off on your journey you need to cast your story with people who will be good for it. If you're not able to do this on the front end, you're going to have to perform invasive surgery at the end of it. So, you may want to spend some time thinking about the people.
But, there's one more technique before you focus too much on your weak areas that need improving. Fill your story to the point of bursting with ideas. This is contrary to the advice elsewhere, but it may work for you. Throw every single f'ing spit ball on the wall. Every one, then make more until your wall is damp and dripping with saliva and molding fiber. Do it till you have no ideas left. Then, at the end figure out what's working. It might be the worst story you've ever told, but there's probably a good one inside and you might be able to see what is working. Read Harry Potter again and you'll see a new idea every two pages or so. Anyone who thinks that book has very little going on isn't paying attention. Most boring stories are bereft of these ideas. The trick is to make them work for revealing character, plot and setting in a way that enforces the narrative and guides everything forward. Harry Potter is thick & tight with idea while being fairly brief: Teaser, Summer (muggles suck), Birthday (You're a Wizard + Wonder of Wizardry) introduce main characters, Go to School, Sorting + Danger Exists, Intro Lessons + Seeker + We Sneak Out @Night, Halloween (Trolls + Friendship + Fluffy), Christmas: Chess + Mirror + Harry's Purpose, Dragon + Malfoy + Voldomort & Unicorns, Exams + Puzzle Solved + Adults all Missing, Solve the Maze, Harry Must Stand Alone, Harry Must Confront All. The end.
Through all of that he collects tons of friends and there are so many ancillary ideas/plots, but they all are in service of this big idea: friendship, loyalty, honesty and bravery in the face of danger will conquer evil. The ideas in that story give it a sense of wonder, a feeling that everything is real. But the talent is in how strong everything is applied, how focused what is left is on the final target. You need lots of ideas, but when you finish they all need to be on point. EMPHASIS: WHEN YOU FINISH. You're not anywhere near finishing if you're giving up after 500 words, you're not finished after a first draft. You're finished after all of the holes have been dug to the right depth.
(Ripping this from Writing Excuses) On the topic of digging holes: You have 1000 feet of hole that you can dig for your final book. 500 should go to your big idea and you can probably dig a couple 100 foot holes, and then you need to do shallow pits that imply and support your other holes. But you need a lot of holes, a lot of them to really make people feel immersed. Dig your holes however you like a book only has 1000 feet of holes. Or, 1000 feet of space for you to explore ideas. So, have a lot of them, but you can't explore them all to death.
It's a good thing you're an idea man. You now need to develop the skills and focus to apply it. My last non-writing suggestion. Try meditation (get headspace, an app). It sounds like you have a problem sitting with yourself. If you can get used to it and gain presence you may be able to override that itch to move away when things get uncomfortable or boring. You need to develop a writing practice & stick to it. It needs to be what you do. It will all get easier when you've written enough words that the scary becomes a bit more mundane. Just keep your ideas alive. They're the torch from which you can birth a universe of utterly amazing adventures.
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TL;DR
Writing a complex story can be a lengthy project, use a project management technique—such as Scrum—to give yourself a fighting chance!
The Specifics
Writing a book (or even a reasonable length story) is a sizeable project, it'll take time and a lot of effort to do. Luckily the modern world has developed several really good strategies to help us manage projects of this size and scale.
Have you considered treating your writing as a Scrum project?
Now, stop laughing and hear me out.
What will it take to write a book?
- A basic outline.
- Character development.
- Writing.
- Proofreading.
- Cover design.
All of these are tasks which need to be organised, estimated, and delivered.
What if you maintained a backlog of work which needs done to deliver your book? Many of these have a dependency order (you can't write big chunks of the story until you've planned out the characters) and that can be represented.
At the start of each week/month/timebox you can commit to a certain amount of work. This could be writing a chapter or planning a character. Holidays and breaks are permitted and everyone knows life gets in the way!
Using Scrum gives you a number of advantages:
- You get a little shot of dopamine every time you complete a task.
- You can use tools like burn-up charts to measure your progress towards the finished book.
- Your life is flexible again, you don't have to write 500, 1000, or a chapter every day!
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The advice is simple. Nail your butt to the couch and type.
It won't always be fun, and your first draft will be very bad. If your expectation is to finish a beautiful story painlessly with a blissful experience throughout ... :-) You see from experience why this isn't what happens.
Also, each part of a story is different. Writing the beginning is writing the setting and introducing the characters. Lots of description. If you have a vibrant imagination this should be relatively straightforward. Writing the middle is all about complications, commitments, ups and downs, successes and failures. You need to be able to strategize out and think about the plot line, something that was not so necessary in part one of your story. You also need to pay attention to tension, make sure you have interesting scenes, challenges, complications that keep people reading. The third part has to take everything to eleven, and tie it all up too, in a way that is satisfying. Really hard. This is where you realize you did parts one and two wrong. :-) The ending is a mess. You plow through it anyway,
...And then you have a complete draft. It might be bad. But it's complete.
Then comes the editing. I'm in the camp that believes writing is rewriting.
Your issues are common. I'm dragging my heels on starting my next book because I want to get the first one perfect first - but i should dig into book two and start writing it. I should nail my butt to the couch and type. I will. I promise, I will.
There is a lot online about the difficulty with finishing a novel. Here's a nice description of Henry Miller's experience with this. But it really boils down to just put words paper and fix them after.
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I suspect you are too focused on your idea. Most ideas for good novel length (or series length) stories are actually pretty simple, and can be summarized in a page. That includes best sellers like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or The Da Vinci Code.
And those one page summaries, or a synopsis, when we read them, are not that exciting, they are bland. It takes a professional editor, director, script analyst or fellow author steeped in the craft of writing to see such a synopsis as describing a vehicle for entertainment, not as being itself entertaining.
It is an extreme form of "telling, not showing" and I suspect that is what you are writing.
Either that, or like a lot of beginning authors, you are writing story climaxes, and they fall flat and feel boring. There are several such climaxes in the story: The MC being thrown out of their status quo world, halfway through Act I, then seeing the full shape of their problem, end of Act I, their striving to solve it, their setbacks, their final do-or-die conflict and prevailing or failing, near the end of Act III, then the end-of-story denouement or aftermath that completes the emotional journey for the MC.
Unfortunately, the climaxes are boring too, because readers don't care about these characters as much as you do. They are introduced cold, we are neutral on the MC, on the villain (if you have one), on any love story or hate story, on all of it. Readers begin their relationship with your story willing to make a friend of the MC, flawed or not, and wanting to root for someone. But that takes time and showing the reader scenes in which your MC does something they can feel something about.
What turns either a synopsis or a list of climaxes into entertainment is adding a lot of detail and scenes filled with conflict on every page that keeps them reading to find out what happens next. First to introduce your character to them in a non-climax setting (their status quo world), then introducing a complication, that becomes a big problem, that drives them to metaphorically leave the status quo world (physically or mentally or morally) to solve it: The moment Harry Potter turns eleven he discovers he is a wizard via the giant Hagrid pounding on his door, and gets whisked off to a new land and new life in Hogwarts, the school for wizardry.
If you did not know that story it might sound pedestrian, even stupid: Since when is "Harry Potter" the name of a wizard? We don't care anything about this kid, or Hagrid, it sounds like a spoof: A very unwizardly commoner name "Harry Potter", and a laughable silly school name, "Hog Warts".
But it is the author's job to make us care about Harry and Hagrid. She purposely chose a common name for her MC and his friends precisely to appeal to her audience, born without wizardly names, to help them be those characters.
That takes imagination and scenes, scenes, scenes, so we care about the MC and what is happening to them. It takes setups: Nobody cares if Alice breaks up with Bobby. We care only if we see Alice as a friend, or a Bobby as a friend, and although we are willing on either front, if we first see them as strangers on the street yelling and cursing at each other, we care very little. Let us live with Alice a few days and see her "status quo", her happy relationship with Bobby before any instigating incident that will lead to their breakup, and then we like Alice, and we don't like that Bobby has hurt her so badly.
Stories take time to unfold, that time is represented in scenes. If all you write is climaxes, the story is boring, even if your ideas are good enough to be bestsellers or great movies. Take your one-day jottings and treat them as the seed of a story; and write 20 pages introducing your MC, in her status quo world whatever it is, encountering the difficulties of life and work and relationships (in family, romance, work and public) and demands on her time and money and getting her crap done every day. It makes no difference if she is a master assassin or a normal ten year old, everyday life is a routine that can go awry every day.
A great plot can be the skeleton of a great story, but all plots are crap without characters we care about. We feel little sympathy for a skeleton, it needs flesh to become Alice, alone and afraid in her life.
The Sixth Sense is a great plot with a great twist, but if I give you a five sentence, twist-revealing, one-paragraph synopsis without characters, it falls flat, or at best gets a chuckle: "Oh, cool, ha ha."
It has no impact because we have skipped the experiences of seeing a kid terrified, the problems of the psychiatrist with his wife, his guilt over his inability to help a previous similar patient, his slow conversion to believing the supernatural ability, and then the shock of learning the full truth about himself. If we don't care about these people, if they are just skeletons, we do not feel happy with them, fear for them, root for them, grieve with them or dread what will happen to them. Make us like them, and dislike their opponents or their situation or whatever is not right in their world.
Then you will have a story.
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