Ais’s answer to “Hi, Ais! I am in the process of finishing ICOS. I just want to express my support and tell you to …” > Likes and Comments
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UGH I know what you mean! Right now the project I'm working on is a story I first started when I was like, 12/13/14 (I wish I remembered which year exactly). I wrote a bunch, started over, wrote, start over again, binned it for a while, wrote totally new beginnings multiple times, set it aside for literally years and years, then recently picked it up again.
I was able to finish the draft of the first book of the series over the years after I picked it back up, writing a huge amount of it in 2016, but then in the past year and a half it's stagnant again in the editing phase.
It's so fucking frustrating constantly going one step forward, two steps back on a story, you know? Like, I know what direction the overall series is going, and I'm really excited about future events, but the process of actually sitting down, writing it, connecting those dots, and more than anything editing things I was excited about previously, is just so slow and kind of discourages me sometimes and ugh.
But here's the thing! I literally took 20 years to finish the first book in my series, and even though I'm frustrated I'm not faster about it, I am SO glad I took all that time. The story is wayyyyyyy better because of it. It's far more complicated, complex, and has a lot more nuance. The characters are so much better. The end result will be light years beyond what I started with as a preteen/early teen. And if I can finish a book 20 years later, I fully believe that no matter how long it takes you, you also can finish your story.
What I recommend, fwiw, is stepping away for a few weeks if you can. Try to come back at it with new eyes. And if you've already done that and you keep getting stuck, find some betareaders who can help you out with their perspectives.
And most importantly: stop trying to make anything perfect. It never will be. I still find things wrong with ICoS even after we had two (I guess now three??? idek) sets of eyes on it, over and over and over, across the years, PLUS readers who were helpful and pointed out when we made mistakes and we fixed those. Even with all that, it's flawed in places.
And that's okay.
The thing is, human beings are flawed, so first of all any story written by a human will always have some faults, and secondly, the characters we're writing are usually human in some form and therefore their story, too, really SHOULD be flawed in order to be realistic.
I think what you need to do is either let yourself fall back to an earlier version of your story or, if you're like I was where I kept starting it over and over and over again, then let THIS version be your last version. It was hard for me to not want to redo everything again, and to be fair, one of the reasons my edit is so slow is I got some great feedback from a beta reader who suggested I change some pretty key factors. It will make the story even better than it already is, which is already even better than it used to be, but it requires rewriting chunks of it and I'm so burned out on rewriting the same story over and over and over that I keep losing my energy to work on it when I actually open it on screen.
But the thing is - I kept telling myself when I started over the most recent time (in like 2012 or whatever) that this would just be one of a million more rewrites. And honestly at first it sort of was. But what I did was I wrote a chunk in it for NaNo, then was like, ugh not sure this is right. I set it aside for probably a year or a few years.
When I next came back to it, I pulled up all those previous rewrites, and I farmed scenes from them. I imported characters I'd created but never used again, and integrated all my great ideas from all my previous versions into one final form.
I think you should do that, too, because then you already have scenes written or characters created, and you can just pull them into what you're doing now as your final version. Take all your favorite things from all your previous versions, throw them all into one place, and instead of thinking you have to totally rewrite from scratch, now all you're doing is writing transitions between those parts. It's way less intimidating, and it probably won't be perfect the first draft or even the first 30, but it may be less exhausting, and less discouraging, and if you can step back from that work for a while and come back to it, I bet you'll see the value in it and how hard you worked and also see how good you are at writing. You'll be able to see it more as a reader, and less as a stressed writer.
idk if that's at all helpful but hopefully it is.
I guess the tl;dr is - I believe in you! :D :D :D
PS: I suuuuuuuuuper recommend Scrivener, dude. That thing is one of the main reasons I was finally able to focus on my last version of the book, because FINALLY I had a place to pull all my various pieces from so many revisions over so many years, all into one location that made it so much easier to reference old stuff and add in new. It does cost money, and if you have patience you can wait till November if you plan to do NaNo because in past years they've had discounts that month if you participate in NaNo (I think it's like 50% off if you succeed at NaNo and maaaaaaybe 20% off just in general?) - but otherwise, if you're excited about writing now, if you can spare $40 or find someone who's willing to give it to you as an early gift for a holiday or birthday or something, for me at least Scrivener has been absolutely invaluable. That being said, that particular program doesn't work for everyone. Some of my friends have tried it and didn't find it jived with them. So maybe check out other options first, see if you can find something that jives with you, before dropping $40 if you think you might not like it. They might have a free trial too, idk. All I know is I did buy it during NaNo years ago, and I didn't really use it much at first, but once I started doing Wildwood Rising and Incarnations through it, holy shit man. That thing has saved my ass. I cannot recommend it enough for having helped me focus and finalize on a 20 year project. Of course, Scrivener is only a tool; more than anything, it was my time, effort, energy, inspiration, etc that went into it. It's just that Scrivener allowed me to focus solely on the story instead of constantly searching for reference materials and wasting all my inspiration and energy on stupid shit instead of on the writing itself.
Anyway I rambled more than I planned, sorry..... ^^; But I do believe in you! You will absolutely finish this project. Just stop telling yourself you have to start over completely all the time. I kept doing that to myself, too. At some point, you have to tell yourself this is it - this is your final form, and it won't be perfect, but you still need to go for it. It doesn't have to be perfect to still be an amazing story.
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UGH I know what you mean! Right now the project I'm working on is a story I first started when I was like, 12/13/14 (I wish I remembered which year exactly). I wrote a bunch, started over, wrote, start over again, binned it for a while, wrote totally new beginnings multiple times, set it aside for literally years and years, then recently picked it up again.I was able to finish the draft of the first book of the series over the years after I picked it back up, writing a huge amount of it in 2016, but then in the past year and a half it's stagnant again in the editing phase.
It's so fucking frustrating constantly going one step forward, two steps back on a story, you know? Like, I know what direction the overall series is going, and I'm really excited about future events, but the process of actually sitting down, writing it, connecting those dots, and more than anything editing things I was excited about previously, is just so slow and kind of discourages me sometimes and ugh.
But here's the thing! I literally took 20 years to finish the first book in my series, and even though I'm frustrated I'm not faster about it, I am SO glad I took all that time. The story is wayyyyyyy better because of it. It's far more complicated, complex, and has a lot more nuance. The characters are so much better. The end result will be light years beyond what I started with as a preteen/early teen. And if I can finish a book 20 years later, I fully believe that no matter how long it takes you, you also can finish your story.
What I recommend, fwiw, is stepping away for a few weeks if you can. Try to come back at it with new eyes. And if you've already done that and you keep getting stuck, find some betareaders who can help you out with their perspectives.
And most importantly: stop trying to make anything perfect. It never will be. I still find things wrong with ICoS even after we had two (I guess now three??? idek) sets of eyes on it, over and over and over, across the years, PLUS readers who were helpful and pointed out when we made mistakes and we fixed those. Even with all that, it's flawed in places.
And that's okay.
The thing is, human beings are flawed, so first of all any story written by a human will always have some faults, and secondly, the characters we're writing are usually human in some form and therefore their story, too, really SHOULD be flawed in order to be realistic.
I think what you need to do is either let yourself fall back to an earlier version of your story or, if you're like I was where I kept starting it over and over and over again, then let THIS version be your last version. It was hard for me to not want to redo everything again, and to be fair, one of the reasons my edit is so slow is I got some great feedback from a beta reader who suggested I change some pretty key factors. It will make the story even better than it already is, which is already even better than it used to be, but it requires rewriting chunks of it and I'm so burned out on rewriting the same story over and over and over that I keep losing my energy to work on it when I actually open it on screen.
But the thing is - I kept telling myself when I started over the most recent time (in like 2012 or whatever) that this would just be one of a million more rewrites. And honestly at first it sort of was. But what I did was I wrote a chunk in it for NaNo, then was like, ugh not sure this is right. I set it aside for probably a year or a few years.
When I next came back to it, I pulled up all those previous rewrites, and I farmed scenes from them. I imported characters I'd created but never used again, and integrated all my great ideas from all my previous versions into one final form.
I think you should do that, too, because then you already have scenes written or characters created, and you can just pull them into what you're doing now as your final version. Take all your favorite things from all your previous versions, throw them all into one place, and instead of thinking you have to totally rewrite from scratch, now all you're doing is writing transitions between those parts. It's way less intimidating, and it probably won't be perfect the first draft or even the first 30, but it may be less exhausting, and less discouraging, and if you can step back from that work for a while and come back to it, I bet you'll see the value in it and how hard you worked and also see how good you are at writing. You'll be able to see it more as a reader, and less as a stressed writer.
idk if that's at all helpful but hopefully it is.
I guess the tl;dr is - I believe in you! :D :D :D
PS: I suuuuuuuuuper recommend Scrivener, dude. That thing is one of the main reasons I was finally able to focus on my last version of the book, because FINALLY I had a place to pull all my various pieces from so many revisions over so many years, all into one location that made it so much easier to reference old stuff and add in new. It does cost money, and if you have patience you can wait till November if you plan to do NaNo because in past years they've had discounts that month if you participate in NaNo (I think it's like 50% off if you succeed at NaNo and maaaaaaybe 20% off just in general?) - but otherwise, if you're excited about writing now, if you can spare $40 or find someone who's willing to give it to you as an early gift for a holiday or birthday or something, for me at least Scrivener has been absolutely invaluable. That being said, that particular program doesn't work for everyone. Some of my friends have tried it and didn't find it jived with them. So maybe check out other options first, see if you can find something that jives with you, before dropping $40 if you think you might not like it. They might have a free trial too, idk. All I know is I did buy it during NaNo years ago, and I didn't really use it much at first, but once I started doing Wildwood Rising and Incarnations through it, holy shit man. That thing has saved my ass. I cannot recommend it enough for having helped me focus and finalize on a 20 year project. Of course, Scrivener is only a tool; more than anything, it was my time, effort, energy, inspiration, etc that went into it. It's just that Scrivener allowed me to focus solely on the story instead of constantly searching for reference materials and wasting all my inspiration and energy on stupid shit instead of on the writing itself.
Anyway I rambled more than I planned, sorry..... ^^; But I do believe in you! You will absolutely finish this project. Just stop telling yourself you have to start over completely all the time. I kept doing that to myself, too. At some point, you have to tell yourself this is it - this is your final form, and it won't be perfect, but you still need to go for it. It doesn't have to be perfect to still be an amazing story.
I know what you mean about rewriting. I wrote the same story at least three or four times and now I am rewriting it again. But at this point it feels like I will probably never get to effin finish it :))
That's why I was so curious how long it took you to get it done. Maybe my problem is just the fact that I don't really seem to know where the story is going at times and, as you said, just let it unfold with the characters' development and not the other way around.
Don't worry. You are not an idiot :p
Thankies!