Guest Post by Patty Jansen: On Finishing What You Start
You should finish what you start. New writers often hear this piece of advice, and there is a time when it could be the best advice a writer could get. There are also times when it is the worst advice.
It is all too easy, when you get bogged down in a manuscript without a clear way forward, to start the next new shiny thing, until that becomes bogged down, too, and you can start on the next new shiny thing. And so on and so forth. Rinse and repeat. Manuscripts build up in the proverbial drawer and none of them are finished. Sound familiar? Then you’re a serial non-finisher. The best advice for you is that you need some discipline and to grab the manuscript you feel most strongly about and finish it to perfection.
On the flip side, who doesn’t know at least one new writer who has spent the last five years churning out draft after draft of the same book? Often, the book is a typical first-ever-novel mess, the characters are Mary-Sue-ish and the plot meandering if not downright absent. And every time someone in the writers’ group says something, the writer goes off and does another draft, because member X said it could be about a conspiracy and member Z said that the characters are flat. So obviously the plot-less book needs a conspiracy and all the characters need lots of personal problems…
Hold the show.
Yes, you should finish what you start, but you should first learn to judge which of your unfinished works warrant finishing.
As a new writer, it’s likely you don’t know. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t have a feel for what makes a good story. I had no idea what was a fresh concept, or even what was required to write a good story. I could tell a good story when I saw one, but hadn’t the skill to see why. As your skills in that area continue to grow, you will see what ideas are snippets of interesting stuff and what ideas are complete stories.
Presuming you’re in a similar situation and have not market-tested any of your work, and you have this cool idea that you want to write about regardless… Well, write it, finish the story, and then move onto the next story. It may not be any good, and you may realize this by the time you’ve finished. You may not even be able to finish it because you realized that you made a mess of the plot (does there have to be one?) or that the book ended up being about something different from what you intended. Never mind, leave it as-is, finished or not, and write something completely different. Never mind the planned sequels. Just pick up something completely different, and, using the skills you’ve developed in your other manuscript, start something new.
If there is one thing I have learned in my time as a writer, it’s that once you stop working on a manuscript, it doesn’t somehow vanish or become unwritten. Those words that made you bang your head against the wall will still be there one, two, three or more years later. Presuming you continue to grow as a writer, you’ll be able to look at those early manuscripts and judge whether or not the story is worth picking up again. What is definitely not worth it is to keep banging your head against the wall with something that is not working under the guise of “finish what you start.”
If you find that you can’t finish any manuscripts, then it’s still worth abandoning those manuscripts in favor of some courses or tuition on plotting to work out what is holding you back.
Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing science fiction and fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story “This Peaceful State of War” placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. Her story “Survival in Shades of Orange” will be published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Her novels include Watcher’s Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (middle-grade SF), Charlotte’s Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy: Fire & Ice and Dust & Rain (post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy).
Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Google Plus, and blogs at pattyjansen.com.
Thanks for this, Patty! And thanks, Alex, for inviting her!
My problem lately is idea overload. After a bit of a drought, I now find myself coming up with three or four new ideas for every one I finish. I even came up with one perfectly logical story from a dream, and my dreams normally have no logic to them. And sometimes the new idea (like that dream) is so compelling I have to put down a story that I like. That dream story distracted me for three days, turning into an even better story. And when it was done, almost immediately another story demanded my attention. Yet there’s another perfectly good story sitting on the back burner, one I’m almost as eager to finish.
If I have to have a writing problem, too many ideas is a good one; but I think it also means I don’t have enough writing time.
Good advice, Patty. And congrats on the novels. I think I’ll scoop up Fire and Ice via Kindle.
Personally, I’m a fan of finishing no matter what and fighting through what you have. At its core, this discipline is what separates a novelist from a short story writer. True, you don’t want to get bogged down with bad ideas, weak characters, and tired plots, but it’s the act of writing that moves you away from such things. The more you write novels, the better you’ll be at writing novels. I think it took King four or five novels before Carrie, and he’s just one of many examples. I wonder how many he trashed. I think he did actually trash Carrie at one point.
If the book sucks, at least you wrote a novel. That’s a badge to pin on your chest. In this day and age with diminishing attention spans and countless distractions, it’s a major accomplishment. Not many people actually finish a novel. There’s a litany of excuses. We’ve heard them all. If the novel blows, oh well. Go on to the next one. And when you do get published down the road, you can re-work your finished novels that didn’t sell, or cannibalize them.
It’s said way too much, but everyone is unique and needs to find a method that works best for them. If stopping halfway through a novel and moving to another helps a writer improve, then go for it. For me, I’d start entering paralysis by analysis. I’d probably also develop a habitat of dropping a lot of projects because of a tastier looking idea–especially when I wasn’t as enthused about the project for a few days (which happens, so add something to the story or characters that gets your juices flowing again). Again, that goes back to the attention span issue, and we’re not all created equal there. Some people can sit through 2001: A Space Odyssey, while others squirm in their seats.
For me, it’s about the discipline, about sitting down every day and meeting that word count. Inherent in this process is writing a beginning, middle, and ending.
I am the classic non-finisher. Lately I’ve finished my first full-fleged genre story, and have since (due in part to a dearth of new ideas) picked up an early draft of an old, unsuccessful story to turn into an actual story. I think part of my problem is that, even though I had the classic genre diet growing up, I went to school to study creative writing, and the combination of “literary” fiction’s focus on the prose itself and mimetic fiction’s favoring of unresolved resolutions made me forget what a story actually looks like. The first of those is a “forest for the trees” issue, and I can’t tell you how many rejections have said basically: “really good writing, but no story/plot.” The second is something I struggle with every time. Thanks for the great posting!
Yeah, a lot of contemporary stuff is very much steeped in the internal, whereas we tend as readers to enjoy both external conflicts (i.e. action, explosions, etc.) and internal conflicts as well. A lot of readers — perhaps because of the quality of the writing — look at an internal development plot, and simply see no story at all. You can’t blame them, I suppose, because in a way that’s a very narrow view of literature…and if we’re not careful, we can run those tropes right into the ground in a hurry.