Update from the OP: I'm not writing much these days so not much to abandon other than ideas that I know I'm not going to pursue. My last one got rejected, largely because I didn't have or take time to do a proper editing pass on it and just threw it up to see if it would pass. I have ideas, just not finding the time or motivation to get them fleshed out.
I have six or seven stories in various stages of completion, and something like 13 pages of ideas that I haven't gotten to yet
I have several stories also in various forms, and a list of ideas for others that I want to complete.
I wish that I could turn out stories as quickly as some writers seem to do. Even working from home right now and having more time to write, I still just can't churn one out that quick.
I have over 20 hours just in editing on the current story I am working on. And still have several more hours to put in before I feel safe enough to submit it.
I started a story with a sex scene in mind and by the time I got there the beginning was way too long. I like building characters but sometimes I go too far and readers wouldn't enjoy the delay.
Gustav Holst once said, "Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you." I think the same should go for writing.
Bearing that in mind, why would you start writing a story if you don't have a story to write? It would be like starting a football match without a ball.
I know we all have different methods, different systems, different motivations, and great books have been written with no planning, just by letting the characters find their own way. That said, at the heart of it all there has to be an idea that drives the process along. As long as it's not a fatally flawed idea then the story will demand to be finished. If the desire fizzles out then rest assured the story wasn't worth the telling.
Oh, and perhaps we need to qualify the word 'story'. If it's a description of two people shagging with a few lines to set up the encounter, then that - valuable as it may be as a piece of prose - wouldn't really get my vote as being a story. It strikes me that perhaps we're not even talking about the same thing...
On the '30 or 40 minutes' line:
Writing is hard work. As Sprite and others above have said, it can take weeks to write even a short story. In my case, I then spend hours and hours on rerreads and editing, chipping away and amending before I can read it through and think it's okay. Then I leave it a few days and start editing again.
(The above probably says more about my intellect and writing ability than it does about anything else: I'm sure there are gifted writers to whom the words come in almost finished form and for whom the above timescale and work ethic would be unnecessary. Hope you are one of those! I certainly am not.)
Good luck!
"If I sign off with pithy quotations, ignore all preceding opinion for I am undoubtedly a fool. And if, after our discourse, I abuse you by proffering my vulgar produce, cast me into the gutter."
I had a sex comedy story about half done and lost it. It can't be retrieved. I have it in my head, so I should finish it sometime.
Okay, I bombed again. God that's frustrating.
To finish up my previous post. Time taken in days/weeks, depends on the time I have available. A good couple of weeks without interruptions, story done.
I can have around six stories going at one time. This comes about from writers block on one, so I head off onto another one. Not recommended, but that's me. (James Paterson does the same thing, and
that's about the only thing we have in common). If you're not prepared to put in the time, don't start, as your final results won't make you or your readers happy. My reward is the comments on my stories and the scores, that's what makes it worthwhile.
ALL the time. Seriously, it's awful. It's in large part due to the fact that editing just isn't fun. The initial writing process is great. There are few things I love more than turning a flimsy idea into something solid and (somewhat) substantial. To have to look at your work at a later date and realize that it's not nearly as wonderful as you'd once thought, and then to have to purposefully find even more fault within it and pick it apart, too...yeah, not fun at all. The results are often wonderful, but the process is daunting.
It's a even worse when you have to edit something really long. I currently have a 25k story sitting in my hard drive that requires excessive editing and I can't even look at the file without wanting to bash my face against the nearest surface. I envy people who actually enjoy editing, I really do.
Anyway, it's a necessary evil. It helps that there's a payoff.
ETA: OP, if you don't feel motivated to write, then don't write. Unless it's necessary for your job/education, I personally wouldn't recommend forcing the process. Just let it come to you. It eventually will.
I'm most likely to scrap a story if I find that I'm writing/modifying it under duress, whether the duress is supplied by me or the PTB. I'd rather have a good story not published than a mediocre story published.
Sometimes I take a break from writing stories that are giving me trouble but I don't abandon them completely. The first part of a story I posted a few months back was written six years ago, so it was a long break, but I eventually came back to it. I've never deleted a half-finished story. Everything gets saved.
I agree with Emerys, editing is a pain. Particularly when you've spent endless hours putting a story together, and then you have to go over it again and again making corrections. That is how I often fail. I don't pick up on a few punctuation errors or something and cop a rejection. Lisa is right on, when she says walk away, have a rest from it, and start fresh later. I also sketch, and find I get a block trying to get some part of a face or something right and it wont work. So I pack it in for a day or two, and then back refreshed, same with writing. At the risk of being shameless, I have some of my sketches on my site, if anyone is interested in having a look. Don't expect too much, I'm not Luis Royo.
I recently gave up on publishing a story here, all due to edits and more edits. It got to be a pain with "sorry but ......" rejections.
While I completely agree that flagrant grammatical errors should be corrected I also think we can get carried away. These aren't literary works of art to be published, they are here for our simple reading pleasure.
My 2 cents.
I've abandoned about ninety percent or so of the stories I've started, maybe more. Sometimes I'll write a story that seems really hot and interesting when I write it, but seems dull and stupid the next day when I reread it, and sometimes I just don't like the idea of the story anymore. I've gone back to stories I've started, worked on them again and left them again, only to return and rewrite them completely. I think it's just a process writers go through.
AlexGG, the site is undergoing changes as we try to improve the quality of the stories we publish on the front page. Any of our moderators would be happy to help you with your story, that's what we're here for. We may not be publishing literary works of art, but that is something that we can strive for.
[url]http://[/url]
I abandoned a story for the first time recently. I wrote it, it got rejected for being across a line (it was for the humor competition). Then it sat there for a month and I just didn't have the wherewithal to make changes. I deleted it and moved on. I don't find it crushing or anything. While there is a certain amount of hard work in putting together a short erotic tale, I've spent 80 hours on a painting only to have to start over. Abandoning a story doesn't bother me very much.
Well you have a good number of options, you could take a week off that story and/or write another to take it off your mind. Then after you can go back to it and if you still don't like it well do what you wish
"I ‘accidentally’ wrapped my hand over my pitched tent. “Trying to cover it up” I lied to myself. Only to be rewarded by chills rocketing down my spine. Fuck! I needed to cum now! "
"Wasted Time" by
I have abandon two stories out of frustration...mainly due to criticism. However, that is due to people who don't follow words
I've done that with a couple stories. Where I just can't see it working, so I abandon it as you say. You can always come back to them later.
I've had 2 stories rejected so far, we are just people trying to read and write them is all, not going for best book seller...give us a break. The last one I re-read 3 times and thought it was ok..very frustrating, so now I just don't visit this site as much
I've started about half a dozen novels over the years. Most of them are just the first chapter, or maybe even just a page or two, and one of them is about 90% drafted. I reworked the opening chapter of the latter into Warning Order, but the interest in it isn't really enough for me to drop everything and finish it. I might pick them up again and finish them all someday. But they've all been overtaken by dozens of fresh ideas swirling around in my brain.
For the time being, I'm happy to keep churning out the short stories one at a time. I'm actually finishing them, which in itself is an achievement. As far as I'm concerned, the more I write, the better I'll get at it. So while some of my earlier work has been set aside, if not abandoned all together, it's all been worthwhile practice.
My latest story is a racy little piece about what happens when someone cute from work invites you over to watch Netflix and Chill. Seeker4 - Do you use a beta reader? Often times another set of eyes doing what a beta reader does (evaluating and commenting on content, pacing, characterizations, plot, continuity, believability, etc.) can help redirect a story you might otherwise decide to give up on as unsalvageable. I've never had a story I was deeply into that I gave up on, but I've done it once with a story I had just started into and realized just didn't have anywhere to go. There was so little of it that a beta reader wouldn't have had anything to work with.
In general, I think my stories and spelling are okay, just not the right quotation marks, ect.
Ever since I had to rewrite my PhD thesis nearly 40 years ago I have polished any piece of writing as I go along rather than go through several drafts. This means that by the time I finish the piece, whatever it is, I will have gone over it probably five or six times. All that is left then is tinkering - changing a descriptive word where I have repeated it in the same sentence - that sort of thing, and correcting spelling - I am a two finger typist and one hand goes quicker than the other which results in a lot of letter switching. If you want to know about my thesis, the examiners wanted it to be completely restructured, something that was really the responsibility of my supervisor who only had an MD, which is a completely different sort of beast. I have remembered this when supervising or examining students myself.
I have been speaking in public regularly for well over 35 years, and have developed my own style, which appears to be both effective and interesting. I should explain that as well as lecturing, I am a lay preacher in the Methodist Church, which some might find difficult to understand in someone who enjoys erotica, but I believe that sex was given to us as something to enjoy, as long as no one is hurt, abused or exploited. I have learned to speak extempore, and these days use powerpoint merely for illustration, or where I need to put up significant or complex arguments. A talk therefore is like a journey from A to B, and as I go I open boxes, or go into rooms along the journey, and pick out illustrations or arguments, more or less complete. This training means that I can hold long sections of text in my head, often several at a time, taking them out to work on them in my mind as and when i have time to do so, and only committing them to paper once they are in a fairly settled form.
At present I have about four stories in my head in varying degrees of completeness, but I have commited parts of only two of them to paper so far. The problem is that i might be inspired by something a Lush friend says, and a whole story comes into my head and demands to be written first. I should also say that I often have lucid dreams which I use as a mechanism to develop stories and talks. At the same time I am still giving talks on a regular basis - at least one every other week - and these take precedence. This week for example I gave an hour long talk on my work as a Governor of our local Hospital Trust (one of the largest in the UK), and a ten minute talk to a different audience on Vocational Training teams.
I take no credit for this ability, it is an accident of heredity, but I have trained my mind and honed my skills over the years, and as they say, practise makes perfect.
Addendum
For those seeking just the right words Roget's Thesaurus is still unbeatable, and far better than any online equivalents. The great authors of the past were great precisely because of their ability with words, so reading widely is still critically important. Finally, poetry is about the use of words in a condensed way, so try Shakespeare, the English Reformation and Romantic poets such as Donne, Herbert and Pope, and one writer whom I find conveys an enormous range of ideas and feeling in just a few words - D H Lawrence - not Lady Chatterly, but The Rainbow and Women in Love.
Addendum
For those seeking just the right words Roget's Thesaurus is still unbeatable, and far better than any online equivalents. The great authors of the past were great precisely because of their ability with words, so reading widely is still critically important. Finally, poetry is about the use of words in a condensed way, so try Shakespeare, the English Reformation and Romantic poets such as Donne, Herbert and Pope, and one writer whom I find conveys an enormous range of ideas and feeling in just a few words - D H Lawrence - not Lady Chatterly, but The Rainbow and Women in Love.
