When You Can’t Finish Your Story
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
When you can’t seem to finish the first draft of your story, that’s a sign something’s wrong. You could try to power through to the end, but if you try that repeatedly and you still can’t finish, then the story is probably broken.
In that case, you have two choices:
- Throw it away and start over.
- Fix it.
Usually, fixing a story is a lot more economical than throwing it away. If the story can’t be fixed, then yes, go ahead and throw it away. But most stories can be fixed. It’s a matter of asking the right questions. Below are a few that may be useful.
Did the Story Have a Plan?
Many writers don’t plan before they start writing. They just write without a plan, and a story emerges.
That’s the theory, anyway, and it very often works beautifully. But in practice, sometimes a coherent story doesn’t emerge. It happens.
When it happens, when you can’t make a story emerge, it may be time to take drastic action. You may need to make a plan, based on the story you have so far. One way to do this is to use the Flowsnake Method that I talked about in the April issue of this e-zine. The Flowsnake Method essentially works my Snowflake Method backward, starting from the story and ending up with a one-sentence summary. And a plan for the story.
Depending on how complicated your story is, using the Flowsnake Method will take you anywhere from a few hours to a couple of weeks. That’s a big time investment, but if you’re stuck, it’s a price you might be willing to pay to get unstuck.
Did the Story Follow the Plan?
You may have started with a plan, but that’s no guarantee of success.
I’m pretty sure no author ever made a plan for a story and followed it exactly. I never have, and I don’t expect I ever will.
Things change as you write the story. Some characters walk on the stage and say things you weren’t expecting. Others just don’t play as big a role as you had expected. Sometimes, small story strands turn into major plot threads. Or the story veers in a direction you couldn’t have foreseen.
Your story evolves. That’s not bad, that’s good. Usually, that evolution takes you to a better place than the story you had planned, and all is well.
But sometimes your story evolves in a way that paints you into a corner. When you’re painted in a corner, you can either walk over wet paint or break a wall. Either way, you need to change from evolution to revolution.
What that means is you need to replan your story. That shouldn’t be hard. You planned the story once, so you ought to be able to plan it again.
But before you make the new plan, write down what’s wrong with the actual story you wrote. And keep that in front of you when you write up the new plan.
Was the Original Plan Bad?
Sometimes, you wrote something pretty close to what you originally planned, but it turned out to be a bad plan.
That can be hard to swallow. You like to think you’re a good writer. It’s tough to admit you made a bad plan. But if the story isn’t working, it’s better to own up to your mistake than to stick to a plan that was bad.
Read the plan again, looking for fundamental errors:
- Can you summarize your storyline in one sentence?
- How does your protagonist change in the story?
- What is the theme of the story?
- Are the storyline and the character arc and the theme in sync with each other?
If you look long enough, you should be able to spot the cracks in your original plan that prevented you from writing the story you wanted.
The hard part is to make a new plan. You may need to break large parts of the story. You might need to throw away some scenes. Or some characters. Or rethink who those characters are.
Do what you need to do to make a plan that actually works. Then get back in gear and follow the new plan.
It’s helpful to remember that writing isn’t some mindless paint-by-numbers thing.
Writing is Hard
If writing was easy, everyone would write a bestseller, and nobody would earn any money, because there would be too many great stories available to buy and not enough buyers to buy them all.
So be glad writing is hard. But that means you’ll often get stuck. Everyone gets stuck. When you’re stuck, you don’t want to hear that writing is hard and everyone gets stuck, but it’s what you need to hear. Because the first step on the road to getting unstuck is to recognize that you’re stuck.
Homework:
- Is your current story stuck in the first draft?
- Did it have a plan to begin with?
- If it had a plan, did you drift so far away from it that you need a new plan?
- If you followed the plan, was it a bad plan to begin with?
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