returning to abandoned fics

[sophinisba]

I wrote a couple hundred words of Lasting Effects this morning (thank you layne67 and absolutefiction) and it was like pulling teeth! Took hours and I was not really happy with anything I'd added. I'm going to keep trying, but damn!

Have you ever managed to return to a fic you'd thought abandoned (I haven't worked on this one in just over a year) and actually get back into the groove of it? Enjoy writing it and finish it? Or do you just find that the energy and the fun of it are no longer there?

Comments

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

I have...

But it takes awhile. I really did this with original fic. Where I had basically abandoned it for nearly 3 years -- felt disgusted with it, it felt trite and icky. But something in me wouldn't let me let it go! And so somehow the urge came up in me again one summer when I was off work and so I just revamped it, took it at a slightly different angle and I finally got more into it then ever before!

With fan fic, it's less complicated and usually if I go back and read what I already wrote, I can gain back the excitement... but not always...

[sophinisba]

I am hoping this will work out because in October/November I was able to go back to another longer fic that I hadn't worked on in a lot of months. I made myself do at least 200 words of that one a day for a month and I really managed to do a lot.

This one is harder in some ways because there's a lot of social/emotional stuff attached from when I was posting it. Also the chapters were very short and I felt liked the early ones tended to pack a punch and the unposted ones really don't have that same power. :(

But looking for another angle as I'm going back to it could be a good strategy. *thinks*

[absolutefiction.livejournal.com]

n'aww. glad you wrote more. yes. actually i have done that. but i don't write fics that are as long as yours. the andy/elijah one i recently posted was begun about a year ago. :)

[sophinisba]

I was reworking the part with Mr. Tate and that was frustrating because it took so long and at the end of that I didn't have any more words than I'd started with. I know they ended up being better words than they had been and that is more important but adding words does give me more of a sense of accomplishment.

Then about an hour ago I had an idea of how I could make that part better but I didn't write it down and now I don't remember what it was. :(

But thank you! We'll talk more when you get back.

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

If I leave something for too long, I lose the impetus, and after so many months, my feelings will have changed some, so I can't really go back and recapture what I felt when I began it. The only thing I could do would be to start over, perhaps from a different pov, or in a different tense, for instance, change from past tnese to present, or from third person to first.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, I really don't think I'm going to get that old feeling back on this one, but maybe I could take it up and get some new energy into it if I find a different angle, maybe just a new plot element. Hmmmm.

[shirebound]

It's nearly impossible for me to get the momentum back for a story if I let it lapse for too long. This is probably one of the reasons I only write one at a time, now. If I let something sit for more than a month, even, the spark and excitement seem to be almost irretrievably lost.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, I felt so bad about leaving this fic in the middle that after that I resolved not to post any more WIPs. It is too easy for me to lose the momentum! On the other hand, as a reader I don't particularly mind unfinished stories and I am usually happy to have more fic out in the world, so it is complicated!

I don't imagine I'll get the original energy back on this one but it would be nice if I could knock a few more short chapters into shape and post them, since they're almost there.

[layne67.livejournal.com]

I'm going to keep trying

Thank you, dearest.

[sophinisba]

♥

[lilybaggins.livejournal.com]

So far, I've had no luck with working on abandoned fics that I started posting. Fics I've never posted are another story--I find that I can get into those, because no one's ever seen them.

[sophinisba]

Yeah, having posted parts of a fic makes it so much more complicated. There's the guilt saying you shouldn't have abandoned it, and there's the uneasiness about some people maybe having read it and not liked it, and others not having bothered, and it is all just... complicated.

[lilybaggins.livejournal.com]

Yep---and I've said in my LJ before that I was going to pick up an old fic, and when there didn't seem to be much enthusiasm, I totally lost all the will to work on it and decided it was useless. So posting WIPs seems to work against me.