Too many thin ideas that dont mesh well

nano

Nano, outline, practice.

If novels are stumping you try working with telling the story itself in a smaller more bitesize manner. Short stories are a great way to learn how to write a beginning a middle and an end. Then get critiques, leanr how to flesh it all out, learn how to develop your characters, as you grow and strengthen as a writer so will your stories.

I often have a great idea that, when I come to look at working it, I discover it isn't enough to carry a story.

So I make a note of it, set it aside, and move on.

Eventually I'll have another idea that just like this one has been a half story, but it fits perfectly with the older one.

Stories rarely burst fully formed from the head of the writer. Sometimes you just gotta sit and wait. And you can never force the other half to come. It'll arrive when IT wants to.

Dixie said:

I try to write the first and ending and fill it in with middles, but even then I am not even sure how I would end the story.

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I've never been able to pull off a story that way. If you're following your passion, more often than not writing the middle leads you towards a different ending than the exact ending you first envisioned anyway. Besides, most writers have trouble taking big leaps in storyline. Writing the first chapter, then the last chapter, then the middle can feel as chaotic as picking chapters at random and trying to write them in that order.

That doesn't mean that you can't have a pretty good idea of where you are aiming. Outlining is something else altogether, and it helps you organize your ideas about what you think about your novel.

Dixie said:

I try to write the first and ending and fill it in with middles, but even then I am not even sure how I would end the story.

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This is probably a lot of your problem. Instead of making a logical progression through the story, it sounds like you're trying to make the story fit the pre-written beginning and end. That may sound like it's an easy thing to do, but it's setting you up so that you can't let the story grow as it develops because it has such a narrow focus. And worse, the beginnings and endings of a first (or even many revision) draft often need a LOT of work. It's not uncommon to toss them out and write a new one.

Instead, just have a general idea of how the story works out. Then write it from beginning to end, being flexible to change the ending if the story dictates a new direction. One of the things I do also is to identify a story-related goal for each chapter. I was just going through a revision of two chapters, and I realized that nothing happened. A character walked into a room of bad guys, some action happened, but the reader didn't learn anything new at all. When I started thinking in terms of a story-related goal, I was able to revise the scenes so that they added something important to the story.

Can you think of it and break it down into individual scenes?

Tri

Dixie said:

How do I get around this?? Ive tried mulling over it but after a few days I scrap it and start over.

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Whatever you do, don't scrap anything. File it away. Sometimes something that doesn't work now, proves invaluable later.

Changes:
instead of going to one city, the MC goes to another
the MC is female instead of male
the MC is a bounty hunter instead of a secretary
the MC raises a dead sibling's child instead of his/her own--or none
and on and on