The very first book I tried to write (barring the awesomesauce vampire collaboration I did with a friend in high school) was fantasy. Secondary world. Set in a vaguely Renaissance era time period. You know, standard fantasy world.
I hated it.
Didn’t finish.
There were things I loved about the book. There always are, otherwise there’s no reason to write it. I liked the dark fairy queen, I liked writing about changelings and a cat with a very special link to his human. I liked the gruff, reluctant hero and the way his wife communicated to him through her ghostly visage (though she was well and truly alive).
What I hated was the time period, which threw me for a loop. See, I love books written in with semi-historical settings. Kristin Cashore’s Graceling comes to mind. Brilliant book. The Song of Ice & Fire books, too, though I never kidded myself I could write anything approximating those vast and complicated tomes. Plenty others I can’t think of off the top of my head. It’s a setting trope I’m familiar with, and happy in, usually.
But I couldn’t write it. So, I set the book aside, this weird, rambling book languishing in the very first of my Scrivener files.
Cut to five years later.
I have this idea bouncing around in my skull that’s been bugging me for the last 2.5 years. Vampires that have discovered a spell to enchant a species of trees, producing berries that can fulfill their needs. I envisioned a kind of Romeo & Juliet story arc. More star-crossed lovers than pre-teen angst, though. But I put it off, thinking I couldn’t do the story justice. I didn’t quite know what to add to the seed to make it a fully engaging story.
I kept seeing these bits of advice: Don’t save your ideas. Don’t wait ’til you think you’re ‘good enough’ to explore those thoughts. Finally, I decided I would write it. And in my head, the story clung to a secondary world, vaguely Renaissance era setting. Horses, nobility, villages and dirt trails. I was cautious, because of my previous experience, but hopeful I could push through this time.
Then the weirdest thing happened. I failed. In exactly the same way. The story has ended up feeling weird and rambling, too long already for what I’m doing with it but at the same time I know it’s not because I;m overwriting. Well, pretty sure I’m not overwriting. And I’m bored. And frustrated.
I wrote not long ago about reaching that scary point, where you start to think your book is a pile of crap and questioning the whole concept of being a writer. I stand by that post: most of the time those feelings are just a matter of temporary insanity. This…feels different. It feels wrong. I’ve been pushing up against that feeling since shortly after I wrote the Scary Point post, and I’m done. So long, Blood Berries. At least, in your current incarnation. So long secondary world semi-historical fantasy. At least, for another five years.
Sometimes projects don’t work. It’s something that I’m learning to be okay with. More importantly, it’s something that I’m learning to identify, earlier, so I don’t waste as much time.
I may return to the seeds of this project and mutate them into something edgier, something more urban and current. I’m not sure yet.
Tell me your thoughts on half-finished projects and abandoned stories. How do you make the decision to quit?
Photo used under creative commons license from Hiking Artist.
Exploring Eliza 
I have the exact opposite problem 🙂 I can’t write anything past fantasy. Howvabout you borrow a but of my fantasy laced brain and I borrow your ability to get something down on paper 🙂
I also shoul not type on my phone. Sorry.
I wish I had the ability to barter creative talents. A pinch of imagination, a dash of language skills, a heavy dose of inter-sociability. Seriously, though, if you need some spurring I have a few tricks. Writing dares are useful. Short stories are great vehicles to try crazy new things. And NANoWriMo changed my life by giving me the permission to suck royally, at least in first draft. That and teaching me the importance of doing something, even a little, each day. I could as a whole lot more but this is getting quite lengthy.
I think that a lot of generic Fantasyland can be ameliorated by putting it in a very specific setting. It doesn’t have to be very different from Fantasyland, but saying, “Okay, France, X century, go,” can do a lot to fix the worldbuilding in the permanent sense rather than the repair sense.
I stopped writing novels when I realized all of mine had the same flaw and I had no idea how to fix it. Now I have one novel idea that escapes it and one novel idea I like better (portal fantasy, based on the short story you read) that unfortunately is totally made of it. Villains. They are not something I’ve practiced much.
That’s clever! I think I will use that idea next time I sit down to start a semi-historical fantasy piece. Maybe even when/if I start re-envisioning Blood Berries.
As for villains, I find my characters fighting themselves a lot. I know you’ve mentioned this as a sticking point before. Do you have any favorite villains? Or, better yet, antagonists? Because they don’t necessarily have to be villainous to screw everything up for your main character.
I’ll have to think about favorite villains. And the portal fantasy story is going to turn on the quality of its prophesied villain, the ice queen or ice people (I like queen because all women all the time except Jadus hello), and I just… have nothing.
So I have to wonder whether the issue is a matter of character motivation, or whether it’s being able to bring mean people alive on the page. (IE- writing people doing mean things.) If it’s the former, well, I think a lot of motivations of villains comes back to the desire for power, because they have something they want to change. And now, I find, I have another blog post to write. 🙂