Just a wee addition—don't know if it will apply to you. I work on a Mac, and am still using Mountain Lion. My wordprocessor is Pages, so I used to export into Rich Text Format (RTF) for Kindle. This worked a treat. I use italics in my story, so it was important that the formatting got kept. I also had the option of exporting in Word. I tried that, and it all worked fine until I opened the Word-converted document on Kindle to read it. The italics had disappeared. Grrr. Especially GRRRR—as the newest version of Pages which I'll be forced to adopt when I upgrade my system to El Capitan this month does NOT support RTF any more. However, I had some good news yesterday. I tested a copy of my novel on my husband's new laptop which has El Capitan installed, and exported via Word on the new system (the only option available for this purpose) ...and hooray! The NEW version of Word did retain the italics when it arrived on the Kindle. Whew. However, all the files I've saved in RTF (we were told less than 2 years ago to future-proof our files this way) will now have to be reconverted back to Pages before I make the changeover. Otherwise Pages won't recognise them or open them. What a palaver.
My approach is like pruning a bush. The first thing I do with my rough draft is a straight read-through as fast as I can. This gets the entire story in my head and lets me see which large parts need to be cut away. I do the big cutting first. There will be whole scenes and possibly entire chapters that are obviously irrelevant. Cut them. Don't waste your time doing spelling and grammar checks on something that is going to be cut. Once you have the big parts cut out, then I start on the minor cuts. Here I look at what aspects of "keeper" scenes are unnecessary. I cut them. Only after I have made all my cuts do I begin to address the writing.
I'm never sure when it's time to do this, before or after the rewrite. And the value of a quality beta-reader is... well, there's no way to put a value on this person. A bad one can either depress you or open your eyes, but a good one can prompt new ideas that even they didn't think of. And a great one? Let's just say it's like having a bottomless purse, a candy store and someone to carry everything you bought (and drive you home and tuck you in, etc. etc.) all this and yet they also manage not to impose on your creative process. If you find one like this, hold on with both hands! I stopped sending first drafts to beta readers because, after doing it a few times, I realized most of the feedback was stuff I could have figured out on my own if I'd taken the time and not fallen into the trap of thinking my story was the best thing ever, even including the bread slicer. I'm certainly not implying that anyone else does this, but it took me years to get past it. Excellent advice. Aim for word pictures; they stick in the mind best.
So I have a manuscript. I'm 16,000 words in butI've lost drive and the story I'm writing has too many holes to count. Is it abnormal to drop a project this far along?
Its happened to me a few times, but what I did, I ended up starting 4 stories I plan to finish and put my dropped projects into those four in a way that makes sense
Does it really matter if it's abnormal or not? If you don't want to work on it anymore, you shouldn't feel like you have to finish it. Working on it still helped you grow as a writer, so it's not like the time was wasted. Save it, bury it in a folder somewhere, and maybe you'll want to get back to it, fix it up and finish it some day. Or you won't. No loss.
Don't force it if you're not feeling it. Set it aside and work on something else. You may find that down the road you get excited about it again, and see ways to fix the holes. Never throw any of your work away! Keep it - you may want to return to it in a couple of months or years.
I believe you've taken a crucial step towards becoming good writer. I have a fantasy manuscript that's at least 50,000 words long, has an outlined plot, and fully developed characters. I abandoned it because I felt there was no interesting way to end the story. It was just another Hero's journey blaaa, and I did not like how it was unfolding. There was no way to end it that had meaning for me, so I stopped working on it. Maybe one day I'll finish it, but right now I consider it a good, long writing exercise. Just never stop writing, and remember that even if your writing blossoms later, you were always growing.
Can't really say much of anything else that hasn't been said, but I'll reaffirm the 'setting it aside' idea. Generally, if you feel you're forcing yourself to do it, the reader will pick up on it. I had that happen with a project of mine where I was going at a pretty good pace but botched the ending simply because I wanted to finish and post it. Others commented that it was good up until the ending and I had to agree with them. I think we all have the potential to lose our drive to finish a genuinely good piece. When you chug away at something for so long and learn to push other idea that don't work with it out, it can feel stale after awhile. That's why I typically have 2-3 different projects in the making at once. If one starts to feel forced, I switch to another and come back to it.
I fully support the idea of putting it aside for now—but keep it cooking in the back of your mind. You might discover a way to sort the problems. If you do that, your enthusiasm will return. I would warn against automatically trashing a story because you've encountered problems or run out of steam. That's a bad habit to get into. It can mean you'll never finish anything, because you'll hit snags in just about everything you write—especially long pieces like novels. What REALLY makes you grow as a writer is working out how to solve problems. How to plug plot holes, etc. You don't have to do it in a dogged, never-say-die fashion, though. Sometimes you do need distance, in order to see what really needs to be changed about the story in order to make it work. Give yourself the distance—as much as you need—but don't give up. Eventually, the elements of the story that are worth keeping will re-emerge, and you'll feel stronger for having 'rescued' the story than you will for having simply dumped it.
It seems a lot of people hit a wall at about 40-50k, so it's definitely not unusual to drop a draft at 16k. Tuck it away in a folder and come back to it in a few months/years/decades
You have to really believe in a project in order to carry it through to conclusion, and if you don't have that belief, you can't force it. Better to put it away for now and turn to something you can get excited about. Maybe a few (or even many) years down the road, you'll get it out and take a look at it and say, "Hey, this might work after all!" Best of luck.
Thanks to all for the assistance. I have decided to put that aside and work on other projects. I have many decades left to get back to it if the time comes considering i haven't even finished my second decade on this earth yet.
My first draft's are alway shorter than my second. That's when I add details, flesh out subplots etc. But I know others get out the pruning shears and trim away. And then there are those who merely just have to change a few things and polish. Curious to know what everyone else does.
I'm definitely more of a dump it out on the page and then trim the fat later kind of writer. Over 75K from my novel's first draft got the axe, compared to what actually got published.
That's interesting, how did you decide what stayed and what was not good enough? I'm 165K in words and I do need to trim mine on my second draft but how would you suppose I do that? Any cues?
I tend to keep a similar word count throughout, though each pass typically nets a small deficit. I make each draft an attempt at the final (whether realistic or not), but as I edit I usually find places where fluff can be cut out and places where thin writing can be fleshed out. Then again, I've never quite made it to the final draft on any of my manuscripts, so...
Without a shred of scientific investigation to back this up (so, no, I won't be playing the dueling links game), perhaps there is a link between fleshers vs trimmers & planners vs pantsers. I'm a planner with some pantser tendencies, and I am defo of the "gotta' felsh it out" camp. It makes sense that a planner would be this way since we tend to start with a known scaffolding to the story and build it up from there, fleshing it out. A pantser goes wherever the story takes him/her so it would seem intuitive that at the end of things maybe some side-routes were taken that don't seem so necessary anymore, or there was a lot of verbiage written with the aim to get to the next thing happening in the story that then needs to be honed back.
Most of the cuts were suggested by my editor. I had to change my dual POV to a single POV, so that meant cutting whole pages where my single POV character wasn't present or aware of the other MC's thoughts or feelings. I also cut a lot of unneeded qualifiers - actually, really and very are my worst crutches when writing a first draft - and dialogue tags. Oh, and I got rid of my prologue - it was four pages of embarrassing info dump that sucked, so I burned it in a (metaphorical) fire. I for sure needed a neutral party to help me edit. I was way too enamored of many parts of my story that didn't need to be there, so I couldn't even see they were problems until my editor pointed them out. So even if you don't have a professional editor, even a beta reader is tremendously helpful IMO.
Very nice.. I think the word "actually" can fit in quite many ways though. And where did you find your editor?
I left a scattered few in there for color. But because I overuse those words so much, it forced me to only use them where they added something of value to the sentence. My publisher provided me with my editor. If you're self-publishing I believe you can hire one freelance, though. And like I said, even a beta or friend can be helpful with constructive criticism.
It is always comforting to know someone else operates in a similar way - thank you! Sometimes I feel like I'm rushing because it all plays like a movie in my head, and then I have to go back and make sure the reader can see all the details too.
I'm not visual, I wish I was. But I write a basic outline, then narrative mixed with dialog, and then fill the rest in. It works for me, although, things change during the course.
