What to do about turds [of the writing variety]

I usually write a story that has some kind of flaw. I've gotten SYW feedback telling me that the story is cruising along and then the problem is solved suddenly and too easily. Other stories had some weak element, something wrong that caused them to lie flat. For me these stories were so problematic that I didn't bother asking for feedback. But in all these cases, I at least finished the story. And in all cases there is at least one tantalizingly good element to make me want to keep at it. I finished one the other day, and started to rework it, and realized that again, it was too problematic to fix. After all, you can't shine shit, right?

I'm getting really frustrated by constantly writing stories that aren't worth fixing. I guess I've written about 10, 15 stories, maybe. I have one 3K story that came out good, and one flash fiction. I'm just talking short stories now. I want to be sure I can consistently write a coherent story before I take on a project the scope of a novel.

Can anybody give me some tips on how to get my story ideas to develop properly? While I have gotten better at approaching the story with 'what could make this worse' and solving that problem, I have the idea that between the very beginning and shortly after that, something goes of track, but I can't figure it out. I wonder if there is some way to identify early on a failing story and quit before I spend an embarrassing and frustratingly long amount of time finishing it.

Anyway, thanks for reading this rather long post, and any ideas or suggestion would be most appreciated. I'm kind of frustrated and discouraged.

LN

CACTUSWENDY said:

You might be a person that using an outline is better. That way, before you start, you will have the full story laid out in events/pattern that has a flow to it.

This is only my two cents on this. Good luck.

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thanks CactusWendy -

I'm talking about short stories - wondering if an outline too much for a short story. But - concerning outlines, I find it very difficult to come up with ideas without writing narrative. It feels abstract and blank. The actual text of the story helps my mind generate ideas.

mirandashell said:

Sorry Layla, I'm a bit confused.

Is it always the same problem in every story?

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Susan Littlefield said:

Layla,

My question also- is it essentially the same or similar problems in each story?

My other question- why can't you fix the problems?

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Miranda, Susan, I think they are different problems, but there are some similarities among them. I'd like to prepare a few summaries, if you might have some time and would consider taking a look.

Susan, in the fixing I've ended up for example, taking an hour to write and rewrite a passage (like a paragraph or several sentences) without progress or improvement.

This is an example of a problem story. I started writing "Tinder" in October. I started with a character in a bunker environment waiting for the apocalypse (waiting for the "tinder" to light) and hoping that the raiding part would be successful. Ok, good, so then I wrote and learned he was a researcher. I wrote for several days trying to get something clear about what the threat was (it had to do with spores from off-world). I wrote for several days going round in circles. So I tried "Meanwhile, in space" and got a really vivid picture of the people responsible for this threat to human life. Sabotage by an political enemy of the captain of the ship, an ethical person who wants to save Earth, but his ship is damaged so they need to communicate with the Earth in order to tell the inhabitants how to disarm a biological weapon of alien technology. They have to overcome the challenge of communicating without common reference etc in order to save the planet.

So, something I noticed as I was writing this, it was one difficult problem after another that the clever people on both sides overcame. In the end, I wrapped up the story with the ship captain explaining that the weapon was on the planet by sabotage, hoping that if they solved the problem their peoples could be friends. I managed to make it so that the researcher at least had to die in order to save all life on the planet so that there was some pay-off. One of the things I liked about this was the problem of how to communicate, and the timing imposed by the speed of communication vs the speed the ship was moving at.

I looked at V2, possibly writing this as a novel (my V1 was about 16K words). In V2 I imagined that the ships doctor might take a shuttle to earth and have communication with the researcher, developing a relationship. One or both would end up sacrificing themselves for a greater cause.

Problems on the re-write. Trouble with my researcher character. I don't feel him - that's where I planted, as described above. Also, it seemed like I would need a fair amount of coincidence to make it work so that one person on Earth would end up being the communicator with the ship.

By contrast, the 3K story I wrote late this summer, I wrote a draft, took a second pass, and an interesting character in an interesting situation was alive on the page. The only thing I can think of is that that story was somehow 'born' simpler. But I used the same method for both. Come up with a title, and start writing. I can say that the first idea of Tinder that came to mind I dismissed, a boy named Tinder who is different from other boys, but I found that too typical, so I tried for another idea, and ended up with the one above.

Thanks everybody! All your responses were very helpful and have given me a lot to think about.

Miranda, Susan, it's helpful to hear 'an hour is nothing'. It's also helpful to hear that I might be expecting too much of myself.