Can never start/finish a Fanfic?

[Zozo1999]

Don't you hate it when you get a good idea for a fic, but could never start it/finish it? Or even continue?

This happened 6 Times for me. (GotL, PMD: Aotp, MM, PF, WP:FL, and now 5 + 5)

Whenever I find a good fic idea, I always put my old one aside, thinking I'll resume it later, but end up not doing it, and it gets abanndoned XD

I hope this doesn'st happen to 5+5, Because I just found yet another good fic idea XD



Anyone else had this happen??

 

[Breezy]

Kinda sorta. I do the same thing as you (start a new fic even though I have a few old ones running) except I do usually come back to the old fic and finish it. I think I've only abandoned one fic because I really wasn't interested in the idea anymore. The other two are side projects, really. I think at my worst, I had four stories running at the same time. I eventually had to hiatus a few. Cursive hand writing.

I do have a bunch of one-shots that I stared but never completed. They're mostly there just in case I don't feel like writing for my current main 'fic. I also have chaptered fics sitting around that I work on whenever. I think juggling around multiple stories is normal. It gives you a break, ya know?

 

[Dragonite Ernston]

I'm slowly plodding along with Generation 2021... after Chapter 26, the update speed was decreased drastically, but it still updates once in a while.

 

[Azurne]

I've only 'officially' dropped a handful of things. Most of my stories I just take entirely too many pains with and try to make them absolutely perfect or the way I want them. What ends up happening is I put up a version, take it down, rewrite it, and put it up again in a never ending cycle. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if I could at least get them past chapter five. So while it usually looks like I've dropped something, I haven't, I'm just taking forever getting it up to my impossible standards, haha.

Oh, and accumulation of story ideas is part of the writing process. I always get a lot of plot bunnies when I'm trying to work on other things, and sometimes it's actually a good thing, especially if I get burned out. It's a never-ending balancing act, but eventually you'll learn to jot all those story ideas down, flesh them out and maybe even write a little, but also keep the ones you've been working on.

Even if all those said stories/one-shots total up to about 30, and you work at a snail's pace. /shot/

Some day though, some day I will post all 30 of my stories, and I will bask in magnificent glory with all my accomplishments. Then take them all down the next month and rewrite them all.

 

[FlamingRuby]

I used to do this all the time--it would start off great, then taper to nothing as I either A. gave up/abandoned/got bored with the idea or B. ran into a roadblock over what should happen next.

I've found that having a plan in mind really does keep you focused on the story

 

[Dragonfree]

I've mostly dropped things, in the sense that I don't think I'll be returning to them until pretty far in the future but still sort of plan to, but once I pass a certain threshold of time spent on it, that won't really happen - I've only put aside fic attempts that were only a chapter or two in (and, well, the seven- or eight-chapter Pokémon/The Matrix crossover parody I wrote aaaages ago never got the sequel I was going to write because the rewrite got this kind of abandoned a chapter or two in, but).

The Quest for the Legends and Morphic would never have been left to rot once they passed that threshold; I've known that I'm going to finish the former at some point since 2003/4 even though it hasn't happened yet, and though the writing of Morphic has been very slow, it was clear by the time I'd written five or six chapters that I wasn't going to abandon that, either. Once I've written so-and-so much of something, it just really gets into my brain; I'll be thinking about it on the bus or when walking, feeling guilt about not updating it, getting ideas, etc., and by that point there's really no turning back.

 

[Aladar]

That's one of my main problems as a writer. I've never droped anything per se but I've put on hold one too many fics in favor of new ideas. It happened to PLX, then I sarted a Digimon fic and then moved on to a Shaman King one. The bunch of ideas about an Overlord fic that I could really see working are scaring me. Just when I thought I was stable with my current fic...

 

[jstinftw!]

I do hate it. I'm always inspired by so many things, and I come up with all these scenarios and back stories and scenes but I just can never get to writing them.

I've currently got this idea in my head and I've sorta started it, just I can't get to typing. @_____@

 

[Unicorn]

Ugh, my problem is that I start to write a story, just one story, but my standards for it are impossibly high. I like it when I writing it, but when I go back through and read it I start to hate it more. So basically what ends up happening is a I scrap it and start again. The farthest I've ever gotten in a fic of mine is like chapter 15, where each chapter is about 5 pages long in a word document. I beat myself up for it a lot. The worst part is when I'm writing and my wording gets really repetitive or I start to find plot holes. PLOT HOLES ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE! Once I find one, I can't move forward until I've fixed it or completely shredded my story. It's horrible, and is one of the reasons why I haven't finished my ONE story yet.

 

[Ultimate Champion]

I share the exact same experience the above poster (Unicorn) described, and I can definitely attest to how frustrating it is, especially as I was working on a story known as Heaven and Chaos Planet sometime in the past.

 

[VioletMantis]

I can definitely relate to this, not finishing a story. It's happen to me so many times I can't count them on my hands. Not just fanfictions, but novel ideas. I've started far too many and never got deep into any except maybe two. The farthest on a fanfiction I ever got was I think 18. Usually my problem is not planning the story out fully before I write it, or once I get so deep into it I begin to read it and realize how "jacked up" it is, so I lose interest because I can't really go back and fix it. I'm just hoping I can finish this new story I'm working on, which is actually a revamp of an old story.

 

[Unicorn]

I share the exact same experience the above poster (Unicorn) described, and I can definitely attest to how frustrating it is, especially as I was working on a story known as Heaven and Chaos Planet sometime in the past.

I'm so glad I'm not alone. DX

 

[Kutie Pie]

Oh gosh, it's a bad habit of mine, so this has happened A LOT with me. I remember, back in the day, that the longest story I had ever written (that went unfinished, but I'm currently, slowly, rewriting it) was up to... chapter 18, I believe, at 200+ pages. I unfortunately got bored and/or noticed how ridiculously random it was, so I stopped. I'm trying hard not to do that anymore.

Otherwise, I have many stories in mind that I have been/currently writing/plotting out, but I want to finish Forsaken, so I'm putting them on hold for right now.

 

[Lorde]

That happens to me all the time. I've planned at least 3 fan fics over the course of a year and I haven't been able to finish any of them. I get these amazing ideas for stories but when the time comes for me to actually write them, I get stuck. I usually put those aside and try writing something else until I get some new ideas, but then the old stuff gets forgotten and I never go back to it. I'm trying to plan all aspects of the stories I've been writing recently. That way, I have a clear plan and I can just start writing from start to finish. I'm not sure if that would work for everyone else, though. I know that planning an entire story from the beginning to the end in one sitting is tricky stuff.

 

[[Imaginative]:[Clockwork]]

My problem is that when I start writing a one shot (which is mostly all that I write nowadays), I'm super pumped about the idea and can't wait to get it finished but as I continue writing (my shorter fics are usually written in one sitting) I start to lose steam and eventually, usually some time right before the end, I think, "I can't post this. It's absolute crap." and end up shelving the idea. XD

 

[Canto]

OH FRICKIN' YES. I have had about 5 or 6 ideas for fan fictions since like, last August. And I can barely ever get started on them! I've got this really cool idea for one right now though, and I'm gonna try really hard to see that I actually do this one.

 

[Mallymkun]

Ugh, never finishing a fanfic is a bad habit of mine. I might just go back and continue an already existing fic, but a plot bunny hops past and I get a new idea. I'm currently working to correct this habit by actually planning the entire story out before writing, something I should've done a long time ago. >_<

 

[Phantom Kat]

The only fan-fic that I regret never finishing is a Pokemon one called Destiny's Tag just because it was the story with the most planning. I had character backgrounds, a map of the main characters' travel through Sinnoh, the plot of Team Galactic, and even an ending. However lack of motivation and planning brought this fan-fic to an end.

What I hate the most, though, is the fact that I have a bunch of plot bunnies that would truly make good fan-fics, but when I start planning them out I find that I can't expand on them as I want. The villain has stupid motives. The plot molds into something too unreal. Basically only the basic idea sounds promising while the rest sounds forced and a mesh of random thoughts. And so they sit in pages or Word documents as I write the only fan-fic I've planned enough to start writing.

It aggravates me because I have these awesome scenes in mind but nothing great before or after that. I like to think that one day an awesome idea pops into mind that would spur more inspiration. It's happened once before, so maybe it can happen again.

- Kat

 

[Crystal]

I'm currently writing only one fan-fic, but this one is a very large episodic story with many chapters, so I often thinking some random episode on some chapter, leave the current episode on the current chapter, so I end up not finishing even the first chapter despite that my ideas in my head had already went up to the eighth chapter.

Moreover, my brain has a "bad habit" of not thinking more deeply into the plot if the preplanning is already completed. This is because I had a writing habit of jotting down the ideas and plot plan summary before I actually go write the main plot down, such that the ideas will not accumulate in my brain which gives me headache of thinking over and over again. But as this writing preparation is done, it seems my brain will automatically give a signal of "this episode is then done", then I can hardly come up the words to write the story down, though I'm done only with the plot preparation, not the writing itself.

This is somehow frustrating me, because even though my plot plan summary had went up to the 8th chapter, I can't really go write out the 8th chapter. This is because the story of this fan-fic is built on previous chapters, each chapter are somehow related to each other. Therefore if I don't really go and complete all my previous chapters, the next one will then have plot holes such that the story seems somehow not logically correct.

 

[Magiclapras]

Yes, many times. I'm currently writing a TailsxCosmo fanfic, but I only have about 100 words or so.