anon from post 178388059366 // by potential i mean that i have a rough idea of the direction i want the story to go, any overarching themes that may appear, and what i want to accomplish with it. i have it all mapped out in my head, but i always seem to lose interest in it before i can actually write it. any sort of enthusiasm i had when i first got the idea just vanishes.

wrex-writes:

wrex-writes:

Okay, some thoughts on what might be going on for you:

1. It sounds like these ideas might be too intimidating. It often happens to me where I’ll get an idea for an ambitious story, I’ll plan out complicated themes and character arcs and intersecting subplots…but once I’ve done that, the task of writing the story itself looks so big that my desire to write it evaporates. The more architecture your initial idea has, the harder it will feel to execute, cuz with each word you write, you’ll see all the plates you’ve got to keep spinning – “I’ve gotta establish this character motivation, lay the groundwork for that theme, set up this subplot” etc. Your brain can’t handle all that stuff at once, so it shuts down.
2. Dovetailing with that: it also sounds like your ideas are too abstract to hook you in emotionally. In my experience, the desire to write a story has to come from a very specific source: you’ve got an image in your mind, or a conversation you want two characters to have, or you want to see how a character reacts to a specific event. Something very concrete and kind of…simple. As I said above, the sooner you jump ahead to larger structures, the more likely you are to get overwhelmed, and many of us react to that by losing interest.
3. So what I’m saying is: try starting smaller. Pick one postage-stamp-sized piece of an idea, one that only implicates a single story element – I find a relationship works best, because they’re my emotional way into a story – and just write one little scene focusing on that. Allow yourself to write a scene without the noise from all the story’s other moving parts. Once you’ve done that, try another scene that way.
4. Oh, and go straight to the scenes that interest you the most. I find that when I start a long story, I’m tempted to write boring set-up first, as if I have to earn my chance to write the fun scenes, and it totally kills my excitement. Don’t do that. Write the fun scenes immediately. Don’t worry that you haven’t set them up sufficiently; you can rewrite. (Also, guess what? You can skip the boring scenes. That’s right – just skip them. If they’re boring to you, they’ll be boring to us.)

Does any of that strike a chord?

Addendum, now that I’ve thought more about it:

When I recall the stories I’ve abandoned because I lost interest, they all have a common element: every scene I wrote felt like set-up for a future scene. I was forever putting something off, an emotional satisfaction that was coming in the future but wasn’t present now, in the scene I was actually writing. Naturally I gave up, because there was nothing satisfying about chasing a future pleasure I was never, let’s be honest, going to reach.

I think a good way to write, if you have this problem, is to – this will sound corny, but – treat each scene as if it’s the only scene in your story. Yeah, I know, that’s not practical because every scene besides the first requires knowledge of prior scenes and every scene except the last implicitly points toward something. But let’s say you had to give someone a short excerpt as a writing sample and you wanted that fragment, despite its clear incompleteness, to be satisfying in itself as a reading experience. Treat every scene as if it’s that excerpt.

Anon, I know you’re not me, but maybe this will resonate with you? I’m…actually going to try this myself.