write_away | Choosing a new project

To be honest I'm of the "it picks me" persuasion. Whatever story is naturally churning out the most ideas and details and makes me feel the most energized when I think about working on it is the one that I follow.

Last year I very reluctantly set my long-time work in progress aside to write my current novel because while trying to plan out the old project was making me feel stuck and lifeless and overwhelmed, the new one continued to feed me new ideas so persistently and made me want to sit down and write it. I felt guilty and scared when I decided to put my "if I can only write one story in my life it needs to be this one" to the back burner, but I decided it was time to listen to the other one, and it was a fantastic decision. Of course, the length I work with means that whatever idea I choose will strap me in for a long haul. So that's an increase in pressure.

Personally (at this point at least) I can't take audience appeal into account when it comes to deciding what to work on. For content within a story, I start to consider that, but if I'm not working on the story that has 100% of my enthusiasm behind it, the story won't happen.

I'm trying to pick one that I'm really enthusiastic about but as of two minutes ago, I only have it narrowed down to 15 ideas, down from 55 so that's some progress.

Wow, that's insane to me. I don't think I could have that many ideas that were distinct enough from each other to be independent stories. I guess I also tend to look for ways to combine ideas into existing ones. If you do want any external feedback, I'd be happy to give an opinion on what seems most interesting / to have the most potential.

I might take you up on that. I'll come up with some short summaries of each of the ones I'm considering. If I have trouble coming up with a pithy description that I like then I'll cross it off the list, so that will help me narrow it down too.

Sounds good!

All right, here goes.

1. Adeline is a witch/demi-goddess who was cursed so that she no longer existed in the world so she spent centuries wandering the earth as less than a ghost, observing events but unable to take any action. She was cursed to stop her from interfering in the plans of a fellow witch. She breaks the curse and tries again to stop her plan.

2. Edina is a citizen of a newly discovered society that has been conquered by a more technologically advanced country. Some of her people have magic that can be used to create illusions. They use it to try to take down the newly installed government from the inside.

3. Galena and her friend Suzana live in the upper classes of society that has isolated itself on a mountain. Suzana has been obsessed with rumors about what's at the bottom of the mountain and she and Galena go to find out the truth. "The truth"= dragons.

4. Imani is a demon who is part of a private investigating firm that also includes a fairy, a water sprite, a revenant, a dwarf, and a kitsune. I have a series planned that is part high fantasy and part hard-boiled detective stories. The first story involves the disappearance of a man's sister that leads Imani back to the underworld that she escaped long ago.

5. The sea has been taken over by some malevolent spirits. Kaya is a pirate who takes advantage of the atmosphere of fear and often makes her victims think the spirits are after them. One of those spirits takes offense at her games and she tries to escape from its revenge.

6. In a world with elemental powers of the usual four elements (fire, earth, water, air), Lucetta has power over shadow. She gets accepted to an academy even though she can't afford it because they want to study her powers and she meets a girl with a similar power over light. The academics argue over what their powers mean and how they work while Lucetta feels she should be doing something useful and turns her attention to the war being fought outside.

7. Marketa's country has recently lost most of their land to an empire that is trying to take over the rest of the land and install a new leader in their capital. Marketa wants to help defend her country but she has a disability that makes it difficult for her to learn magic. She meets a woman who has lost a hand and learned to work around it who is willing to work with her and a group of others with disabilities.

8. Sanjana has fire powers that she was not always able to control so she keeps herself at a distance from other people and wanders around with only the bird spirit that is the source of her powers for company. Her power is discovered and blamed for a disaster at one village she visits and a team of assassins is sent after her to keep her from doing more damage. She manages to survive their assault and convince them that she didn't do what she was being blamed for and they work together to find out who really did it.

9. A mother comes to the church to say that she thinks her daughter's paintings show visions of the future. Vanora is on a committee that evaluates claims of prophets and she uncovers a conspiracy to take advantage of this girl's visions.

10. Yelena's family runs a funeral service. They have bone magic and it's an open secret that these powers can be hired out. Yelena secretly works against any job of theirs that she thinks is unethical (someone asking them to commit murder is not unheard of) but then she comes across a girl who wants them to kill someone who might actually deserve to die. She doesn't know if she should interfere as usual or if she should help her family this time.

---

These are my top new ideas. I also have a couple that I've (just barely) started.

1. Marielle has run away to a temple to become a novice priestess to atone for letting her mother die. After she arrives, some problems with their healing magic start happening and she can't help worrying that it's her fault. They try to figure out what's wrong while she gets to know the other novices and comes to terms with her mother's death.

2. Greta has been treated for delusions in the past and when she starts seeing things and coming up with strange theories to explain them, she worries that it's happening again. There really is a supernatural problem but she can't be sure what is real and what is in her head.

And I didn't say it in my little summaries because it's not the main focus of the plot, but pretty much all of these involve lesbian romance.

Ooh, 4 and 10 sound really cool to me. 4 sounds like a great start to a series and 10 sounds like it could have some great moral gray area stuff going on. "Bone magic" is an awesome term. 7 would probably be my runner-up.

So I would vote for one of those. It's funny, I can see where I would start combining things if the ideas were mine (1&8, 2&7). I guess if I want to learn to write short stories I need to stop doing that so much.

Just popping in that I totally thought of combining 2&7 as well.

The details I didn't include in the summaries make 1 and 8 pretty incompatible, but I could see how I might be able to canabalize elements of 2 into 7. 2 is actually also similar to another story in the type of magic used which is why I didn't include that other one in my list, so it might be best to just let 2 go and break off bits of it into these two other stories.

Yeah, I can imagine how 1 and 8 could be quite different with more detail. I think 7 with elements of 2 would be really cool.

I would read every single one of these stories. I don't think that's helpful in the winnowing down process. LOL I think 6 and 9 interest me most.

Aww thanks. lol the one thing I know I'm good at is coming up with ideas that people like the sound of. Haven't gotten any feedback on the executions yet. :p

I have a file of all of the plot ideas that I think up, so I can go back to them later. I try to work on them in order-- the oldest idea I have tends to get worked on first.

I have most of my ideas in separate files but I also have all kinds of lists of various ideas. I spend way too much time making lists of my current favorite ideas rather than actually writing.

I never thought about going in order. I wonder if that would help me if I can't decide which one I most excited about.

Yeah that way I feel less guilty for them sitting in limbo for too long and less stories end up sitting around for a year or more, haha.

I have this annoying problem where I want to work on one story, but my writing muse calls me to another. It's pretty hard to write for story A when you have dialogue for story B running through your head. So I guess it's a bit of both, but mostly the story chooses me. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of stories started, but not many finished in a reasonable amount of time.

I've gotten into the habit of remembering that, no matter what I write, there's someone out there who will enjoy it. Even if I don't end up putting it out anywhere, I usually enjoy what I write on some level.

I'm trying to get myself in the mindset that you're talking about in your second paragraph but I'm just not used to thinking about people reading my work. I spent 6 years thinking that no one would ever read my writing and I only just decided that I want to try to publish something this year.

Yeah, actual publishers are a pretty different creature from readers on the internet, so it makes a lot more sense to remember your audience. I write just to get ideas out of my head and into something coherent, so I'm really my own audience most of the time. It's very freeing to only have myself to please!

It's pretty hard to write for story A when you have dialogue for story B running through your head.

That's what happens to me sometimes. It's only happened once persistently enough to make me actually switch what I was working on, but I worry a little that I'll never get back to the project I put on hold.

Sometimes what I do is I make a list of my top choices and then I go through that list and make a new one out of my top choices from that list and keep doing that until I only have one left. But I can't seem to narrow it down this time.

This is also one of my methods.

I am incapable of working on just one story, so I need many methods of dealing with this problem. The longest I've ever managed to stay on one project was 6 weeks at a time. I read the same way, several books at once, so it makes sense that I'd write like this as well.

I've tried to stay on one story, so hard, and just end up stopping writing entirely. So I've accepted this is how I am.

I have perhaps 30 projects on the go at any one time. Actually, many more now I think about it. Perhaps nearer 50. Of course, this is insane.

So I do what you do, and make lists. My current list has three stories, that is ones I've actively worked on in the last two weeks. That's manageable. I'll work on one story for a couple of days, switch and go onto the next, and then on to the third, and back, and so on.

I'd rather be the sort of person who can write one story all the way through, but it seems to be this or nothing.

One of the best tips I ever received was to note down the major plot points of each new story as they occur - key dialogue, character details etc. It doesn't me take long. Usually less than a few hours in total. Otherwise the new ideas nag away at me while I'm still steaming ahead on my other project and it's too distracting. If my new story summary is safely contained in a document, that helps me mentally set it aside until I'm ready to deal with it later.

And yes, my 50 story ideas are all very different, in answer to the other commenter above.

If you're the sort of person who also likes to write to-do lists before you go to bed at night, like I do, which help you sleep by getting buzzing ideas out of your head, that trick might also work for you.

I've heard that many writers have notebooks of hundreds of unfinished stories. And they value this, and return to it many times in their career. I've tried to think of my 'problem' as more like a 'treasury of ideas' but I've had limited success. I'm too envious of other writers who can focus.

When I started writing I had no problem deciding what story to write and sticking to it. It only became a problem several years in. Perhaps this is common?

We definitely sound very similar.

I don't have that many projects going though. Technically I've got about 40 WIPs going but I have my WIP folder split into three subfolders and most of them are in the Inactive folder. I don't think I've had more than four or five in the Active folder before.

Yes, most of my 50 or so stories are on indefinite hiatus. I've worked on three the last two weeks. There are about another ten I have concrete plans to come back to.

When the multiple WIPs started happening to me I felt like a failure. It's hard to describe how much it affected me without sounding like wah-wah-wah. But I've learned to live with it. I've even started finishing stories again, although it required re-learning how to work.

I think one of the reasons it happened is my standards just got higher. Roadblocks appeared in my stories because I saw they needed work, whereas before I wouldn't have noticed. That's when my unrelated ideas have the danger of popping up.

Tricks I use:

- I get chapters out to another person, it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter in what condition. Just to keep a forward momentum (instead of sideways onto something else)

- the 'future plot ideas' folders as above.

- I try to write in large chunks of time. I find if I write 16 hours in a row, then nothing for 3 days while re-charging, I'm much more likely to stay on the same path than if I write 4 hours a day for 4 days.

- These days, I never plot my endings. I find if I plot too closely, I've no reason to write it. I just decide what emotional notes I want to hit, then leave the details as a reward for myself for actually writing the thing.

So you organise your writing into active/active and WIP/finished folders? I've never thought of that. I file both WIPs and finished stories by genre.

Actually, I like the finished ones mixing with the WIPs. If I just looked at a wall of WIPs every time I opened Word I'd get depressed.

Whoa, I prefer to write in large chunks too and I don't plot my endings either. I have never come across another person, outside of some special circles of NaNo, who will write for at least 10 hours straight like I do sometimes.

I definitely like having my WIPs and finished stories separate though. It's a reward in itself to be able to move a story from the WIP folder to the finished folder. And there wouldn't be much of a point for me in organizing by genre since I write high fantasy almost exclusively. I could try to break it down into subgenres but I don't like to get too nitpicky about that.

It's a reward in itself to be able to move a story from the WIP folder to the finished folder.

I never thought of that. I need all the tricks of encouragement I can muster.

I might put a big COMPLETED next to my finished stories by renaming them. That might do the same thing. Or I'll try moving completed stories to a separate folder and see how that does.

Perhaps I could copy them instead of moving and get the best of both worlds.

I couldn't do NaNo because I need breaks inbetween my writing chunks for reasons of basic bodily health - mostly sleep. I write badly on little sleep. I tend to not only write gibberish, I don't realise that I'm writing gibberish, and I tend to edit over the good stuff I already wrote and not save a copy before I do it.

I've got to the point where I don't even bother opening Word if I haven't had 8 hours the previous night. I've spent so much effort in the past, writing my little socks off on not enough sleep, to only get to a point worse off than when I started.

If I've had a good night's sleep, on the other hand, I can pull over 24 hours of solid writing on occasion. I think I did 27 hours during one stretch last month.

Not editing though. I do that in smaller, more sensible chunks.

I write mostly sci-fi (or speculative fiction, as they like to call it these days since sci-fi is so uncool) and ancient historical AUs. So it's a little easier for me to break my writing down by genres.

I tend to work on the one that's under deadline first. Which means I really need to come up with something to send to the UFO3 antho and stop dinking around with edits on the Hell's Process Server story...

If I don't have a deadline, I work on whatever one I have the most complete outline for. If I have more than one complete outline, then I pick the one that's pinging me the hardest (which usually has a werewolf or an angel in it, these days, but not always).

But I have an odd process that probably wouldn't work for everyone--I usually outline a bunch at once and then bang out several first drafts one after the other, and then work on edits after all the drafts are done--unless I have a deadline, in which case I work on that story.

I really should be working on the one deadline I've been looking at but that one won't take me very long to write.

I think your process could work for me since I'm good at banging out first drafts quickly but I need to pick one to start on first.

I have to work to a deadline or an obligation myself. So I write the conference paper that I said in my yearly goals that I would write. Or I write the fanfic for the fest I signed up for. Or (I'm part of a writing group in RL), I write the short story or the personal essay that I've committed to write for this month. I'm also doing a Letters Game with a friend that is proving to be very fun.

I have no time any more to write something that I haven't committed to write. I can't remember the last time I just spent time writing something (outside of blogging or meta) that wasn't under deadline or obligation. :(

Okay, first of all: I deliberately chose a non-creative career (currently in school to be an engineer) because the idea of selling my work makes me freak out. I grew up poor, and the idea of basing my livelihood on something as ephemeral as the stories in my head kind of freaks me out.

Plus, nothing kills inspiration faster than when it feels like work. For me writing should not feel like homework, which is my number one cause of procrastination housecleaning.

So, short version, I don't pick stories on whether or not I might be able to sell them.

Honestly, I generally just go with whatever story I feel like working on. I mean, if I'm writing say, a fanfiction for someone, I'll make an effort on focusing on that one. But usually I write...whatever lives in my head that day.

My flashdrive is a graveyard of dead projects where I got bored and wandered off. But there's always something in the back of my mind thinking "hey, maybe I can do something with that..."

Oh I'm not planning on trying to make a living off writing. It would just be nice to be able to make a little money from it. For all my agonizing over a possible audience, I'm really not focusing too much on it.

Yeah, that's fair. But for me, any thought of selling it makes me freak out. It's a part of it being safe - if I think about throwing it out into the wild, then I sort of freeze up.

It's totally reasonable to think about making money off of your writing. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. It's just easier for me to deal with writing if I think that it doesn't have to matter to anyone, and I can keep it safe and secret inside of my own head.

I understand that. I'm kind of like that too but I'm trying to move past it for various reasons, both high-minded thoughts of sharing my work with people who would enjoy it and also a tinge of desperation to be making money somehow even if it's only a little.

But I completely get where you're coming from.

Yep. Everyone writes differently and for different reasons, and everyone shares for different reasons. Part of why talking with other writers is important - comparing notes on what being a writer is like and how it works.

(Sorry if I came across as rude. Totally not my intention. I'm just occasionally super awkward.)

I don't think you seemed rude at all. No worries. :)

Choosing a new project

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