McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
It's Crap! Should I finish???
Blaze:
Finish it! Put it aside for a while and let the thing settle. Even if it is truly awful, in time it may become amusing, and if it isn't truly awful, it can be resurrected and rewritten or may even have value in the parts department.
HUGS
blgarver:
Okay. I will finish it.
*brushes off knees*
*pulls self up by the bootstraps*
Onward into the fray.
Thanks guys.
SailorYue:
Ive been there with fanfics. Where i simply gave up on them. I have one unpublshed fanfic that is pure gold imo and i didnt have the ending for a kong time. what i did was when i wanted to stop because of The Block i put the folder a way for a couple months. When the story was out of my head i read it again going over and removing or changing somethings. By the time i reached that part i had a decent. A profesional mite be able to pick 6ut where the writing changds but honestly i think its a great epic fic. Hells i even had sequels(it would have been a trilogy) in my head but they stayed there. Perhaps if i ever publish the fic ill write them but i know theyl suck. perhapsyou should do much the same. Set it aside, clear your mindp and go back at a later time.
azjayp:
i'm sorry, i have to disagree with everyone else on this one. if you didn't know where the story was going to begin with, all finishing it would do is create a lot of stress and hard, painful, tedious work for you that may change DRASTICLY and turn out to be useless later becuase of the direction your story goes when you re-write. i think "pushing through" will also make you hate the book that much more when you read through again.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: azjayp on September 13, 2008, 06:07:51 AM ---i'm sorry, i have to disagree with everyone else on this one. if you didn't know where the story was going to begin with, all finishing it would do is create a lot of stress and hard, painful, tedious work for you that may change DRASTICLY and turn out to be useless later becuase of the direction your story goes when you re-write. i think "pushing through" will also make you hate the book that much more when you read through again.
--- End quote ---
Depends entirely on how you work and how your story isn't working. you seem to be assuming that if the story goes wrong at point X, everything after point X will need reworking once you fix point X. Believe me, this is not always the case.
the way I work, I can easily know what the next big climax point is, 50,000 words and ten chapters away, but not how I will get there from here. Sometimes I get the right scenes in the right order between here and there and that's fine. Sometimes it's almost right and I can go on to there and then go on from there and come back and fix later because I know it won't change anything past that climax point.
Besides, blgarver said he was in the final battle scene, and that there was a heck of a lot of work to do anyway; and if you've written 95% and know you'll have to rework 80% of the thing, writing the last 5% has as the worst case result you now have to rewrite 85% of the thing. On the other hand, it has the best case result of "Oh. This is how I want the thing to end. To make this scene work I need to introduce Anna's grandmother in chapter 5 and have her show up at the party in chapter 23, fit in a conversation in which someone mentions in passing that they have five-shot repeater crossbows in the Scarlet Empire so that the assassin can have one at the end and that can go in the discussion in the barracks in chapter 18 where they are showing off their magic swords, and oh, that's what the damned goat was doing, so have it be unobtrusively in the background more often." then you go back and do half a dozen single-line insertions at the right points and never tell anyone you didn't mean it that way all along. Some things you don't learn until you try writing them, and this can include bits of resolution that you do not know until that point you need to set up.
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