Story I Like, But Too Many False Starts!

Sometimes it helps me to focus on conflict - specifically, trying to find something 'story-able', that is something that you can 'hook' into and which will function as a mechanism to advance the story.

If you've got the ending, try writing it backwards.

Note: I haven't tried this myself. It might be a rubbish idea.

I was going to say that, or write in a disorder of scenes and see if you can connect them that way.

Or if you're really struggling with this idea badly, try thinking of a brand new idea and see how that works. Nothing says you HAVE to stick with this one idea.

There's a story in which I think is so neat about this plant girl that has to plant herself in the ground every 7 days and comes up someone else, or something else like a cat or a fox. But then she meets this one person and falls in love and has to figure out what to do before she plants herself in the ground again or she'll lose him forever. I've had this idea for a long LONG time and always wrote something else. Wrote 5 novels after this idea. I tried it a few times with a bunch of false starts and just couldn't do it. SO even though I think it's this brilliant idea, I just can't come to terms to write it. Some ideas are just that way. So don't stick to just one idea. You might find if you free yourself of this one idea, you'll come up with something completely different and better.

I'm writing a sequel to my book and am having an extremely difficult time with getting the beginning off of the ground. Like has been mentioned in this thread, I've resorted to jumping around and writing out events that take place later in the book. Whether or not I'll be able to connect them later without heavy revision is anyone's guess, but it did help me get words onto paper. That's sometimes enough to get me going.

Taylor Harbin said:

That's just it! I thought I had that. Characters arrive at location. Incident happens. Investigation leads to worse problems and then arguments between two of the characters that leads to really big problem. But when I sat down to write it out, my brain put the brakes on. I'm almost sure it's just the way I'm writing it. I've tried 1st person, 3rd, and diary form, but nothing seems right​.

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Taylor -

It's actually like this for me pretty much *aaall* the time. The rate at which I have beginnings only is something ridiculous - I haven't actually tallied things up but I imagine it's something like 20:1. I get an interesting person in and interesting situation, I'll have Big Conflict and a vivid setting. I'll get a vivid opening and I'll be able to write that but then it's like the path that took me through that opening just comes to an end - like the animators just stopped drawing the scenery...

It's kind of like - forex - lets say I'll have this guy on a desert planet and he hates his boring life but he has a secret that even he doesn't know - and there's this Galactic Empire which everybody hates - & I'll have, say this guy fighting with his uncle - all that good stuff - but I just for the life of me can't figure out - that this guy just needs to rescue a pair of robots hiding secret plans.

So, of late, I've been looking at all kinds of stories and trying to understand the relationship between the Big Conflict (a civil war, or a power struggle in an ancient court or what have you - I write fantasy) and the story-advancing conflict.

It's helped me a bit with some stuff, but - it may be that one has to develop more as a writer before one can see the necessary connections, as Undercover says.

If I can't get something going it's usually because I'm starting in the wrong place, or have the wrong approach to it. So I forget about my plans and just start writing the scene which feels the most pressing or exciting to me, even if it doesn't fit my plan or it's halfway through the book I'd hoped to end up with. Do what makes you feel good. You might find in the end that you don't need the scenes which gave you all that trouble, or that they are much easier to write once you've got more written to support them.

Not to discourage you but I was in a similar situation. I had a shot story that seemed really promising and was eager to write it but never finished it. I couldn't stick to one tone. Sometimes I wanted more humour in it, sometimes less. Scarier tone, post-modern tone. Finally I realised that I wanted to put too many ideas in 12 pages and that I had been sitting on it too long. What once was a fresh and exciting idea, was now beyond its shelf life. So, I threw it out and wrote a short story about a writer who decides to get rid of his story.

I have to admit that it was also a learning experience and it radically changed my approach to fictional writing.
My first step is now to map out the entire story. How does this chapter begin and how does it end? What do I want to accomplish here?
Then scribbling. Bits and pieces of dialogue, sentences, entire paragraphs. An idea that I also picked up was minding the pacing. Playing with the tempo can bring dynamics to the story which is beneficial for the reader and the writer. Because I wanted to put so much into that short story, all the dynamics were completely lost.
After that, I can get to the writing, it is still an arderous process but at least now there is a frame to rely on.

Wolfalisk said:

I'm writing a sequel to my book and am having an extremely difficult time with getting the beginning off of the ground. Like has been mentioned in this thread, I've resorted to jumping around and writing out events that take place later in the book. Whether or not I'll be able to connect them later without heavy revision is anyone's guess, but it did help me get words onto paper. That's sometimes enough to get me going.

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I am taking this approach with my second novel. I have it roughly mapped out on paper and in my mind, but there are scenes that are so vivid in my imagination that I am compelled to write them immediately. When I begin writing in earnest I'll integrate them into the story and modify as necessary.

Layla Nahar said:

Taylor -

It's actually like this for me pretty much *aaall* the time. The rate at which I have beginnings only is something ridiculous - I haven't actually tallied things up but I imagine it's something like 20:1. I get an interesting person in and interesting situation, I'll have Big Conflict and a vivid setting. I'll get a vivid opening and I'll be able to write that but then it's like the path that took me through that opening just comes to an end - like the animators just stopped drawing the scenery...

It's kind of like - forex - lets say I'll have this guy on a desert planet and he hates his boring life but he has a secret that even he doesn't know - and there's this Galactic Empire which everybody hates - & I'll have, say this guy fighting with his uncle - all that good stuff - but I just for the life of me can't figure out - that this guy just needs to rescue a pair of robots hiding secret plans.

So, of late, I've been looking at all kinds of stories and trying to understand the relationship between the Big Conflict (a civil war, or a power struggle in an ancient court or what have you - I write fantasy) and the story-advancing conflict.

It's helped me a bit with some stuff, but - it may be that one has to develop more as a writer before one can see the necessary connections, as Undercover says.

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that example is pure gold if we look at it carefully. It's such a neat way of looking at how to connect disjointed situations togather--its the damn robots. We need to have robots in all our stories.

I do everything in my writing process by trial-and-error, and it sometimes takes me months if not years to finish trying all of the errors.

Most notably: I had an Urban Fantasy world and characters that I loved, but that for over a year I couldn't come up with any stories about, and a bank robbery scene that I loved, but that for months I couldn't flesh out into an entire story. Then I realized that my bank robbery scene took place in my Urban Fantasy world, and now I had a story about my bank robbers discovering the existence of the supernatural for the first time.

... Only it took me three tries to work out how the starting point was going to go down

First, I thought my narrating was going to be rudely woken up from a one-night stand by an accomplice showing him on the news that the bank they were planning to rob later that day had just been blown up by an unknown terrorist. I didn't get any words into this opening before deciding it didn't work.

Then, I thought my narrator would start out at the police station being interrogated for being part of a group that ran to a bank with guns and ski masks, only for the bank to blow up before they could get in and for them to run back to their getaway car empty handed. This basic set-up worked really well in my Doctor Who fanfiction, and I got about 2k words into it for my UrFan too, but realized that it wasn't working as well in my novel as it was in my fanfiction.

Finally, after researching bank robbery (and finding out that one guy can walk into a bank, unarmed, ask the teller for money by pretending to be armed, and get an average of $4000 with a 2/3 chance of getting away with it), I decided that my crew would be trying to pull of 3 small robberies at the same time instead of a large one, which then set the stage for one of my protagonists to be caught in the explosion itself and spend the almost the rest of the book unconscious in a hospital with her brother at her bedside.

Suddenly the conflict between my protagonists and the bomber became a lot more personal than just everybody trying to get more money than each other and I was able to establish that my protagonists genuinely care about each other – but nobody else – by having my narrator rush from his bank to the scene of the bombing and then force two paramedics at gunpoint to take his friend to the hospital instead of the guy they were already getting ready to load up. (My new backstory that the gang owed a ton of money to a loan shark also helped )

TLDR: I thrive on taking my ideas apart at every step of the way and seeing how I can put them back together, and I always prepare for this to take a very long time. The key is that I'm constantly asking myself what I like and don't like about every tiny detail.

Why are you giving up each time? Is it because the drafts aren't working or because they aren't perfect?

Sometimes I find that the best way to get going is to ... ahem ... get going. Write that first scene even though it's not perfect. Then push through to the finish. Only then do I go back and fix the first scene in the editing phase. By then I know a lot more about the characters, the setting and the plot.

Could you be giving up too early because you are expecting too much from a first draft?

If your struggle is with the "beginning", try to move on to a later part of the story and write that, instead. Beginnings are a bitch to get right, in no small part because they need to fit what happens later, and if you have no "later", it's a problem to make that fit.

You can come back and finish the beginning later.

caw

Old Hack said:

If I can't get something going it's usually because I'm starting in the wrong place, or have the wrong approach to it. So I forget about my plans and just start writing the scene which feels the most pressing or exciting to me, even if it doesn't fit my plan or it's halfway through the book I'd hoped to end up with. Do what makes you feel good. You might find in the end that you don't need the scenes which gave you all that trouble, or that they are much easier to write once you've got more written to support them.

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QTF.

Find the climax. Now work backwards. Figure out how the characters get to the climax (and, eventually, the ending). It may help.

Taylor Harbin said:

That's just it! I thought I had that. Characters arrive at location. Incident happens. Investigation leads to worse problems and then arguments between two of the characters that leads to really big problem.

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Which one of those is the real conflict? Why did they arrive at the location in the first place? Is that the real conflict? When they arrive at the really big problem, is it a really big problem that they arrived at only by coincidence, and can't get out of? Is it a really big problem that if they hadn't arrived at the location, would have still been a really big problem, but if they hadn't been at the wrong place at the wrong time they would have chosen to avoid? Or is it a really big problem that was important for these particular characters to resolve from the beginning, they just didn't know it?

What you describe sounds like it could be that you've set up the dominoes just so, so that when this one falls it hits that one, and when that one falls it hits the next one. That's cause and effect, but not in a literarily satisfying way. It's more satisfying if the reader believes the cause would inevitably lead to the effect. Circumstances may conspire to resolve the story in a condensed time frame, but the story reveals some essential truth about the way things must eventually turn out, sooner or later, not the way the author arbitrarily decided them to happen. If that's not the case, maybe that's why you can't get started, because you are feeling like, "What's the point?" about your setup.

I have this problem, I have to have everything perfect the first time and then I'll re-read the work a million times over. I get so fed up with how bad the beginning sounds to myself, that I just give up xD