Ugg, This sucks. I'm stuck, lost, and want to start over. But i desperatly don't.

[ascanius]

I'm at 91k words approximately 130+ pages and.... The more I write the more i get ideas that totally clash with what i have already written, and I really like them better than what my original plan was, to the point I have absolutely no idea where anything is going anymore. I'm having to scroll through pages and pages of text to find characters I mentioned in the beginning, it's hopeless. Loosing my digital map that I spent hours making, @*#$&#! hard drive, BACK UP! I wont make that mistake again, though i did back up my story. I've taken to just making up locations to edit later because i don't want to look through the four 3 feet by 2 feet sheets of paper just to find a single location and the distance then convert that to days by horse or whatever. I've given up on trying to keep track of the time in the story, days moths etc. Keeping tack languages and different speech patterns of the multitude of different races and people along with their customs and intricacies is a nightmare. I reached one climactic point now my main character is lacking in all uniqueness that I had at the beginning, total reversal from what he was. Basically now everything is lame, lame, and lamer. In desperation i have jumped from my four characters down to two, and some how back to four again. I have thought about printing the entire story to so i can stomp on it then rip it into very small pieces then dissolve it in Sulfuric acid in the chem lab. Did i mention i am nowhere near being finished.
Ok. I think I have whittled down my main problems. First an outline I have one but discarded it when i spent hours trying to get something to step forth from the insubstantial abyss of creativity thus abandoned it. Second background, setting, world building..Detail, detail, and more detail ect. Third organization, i can organize my lab note book but this...argg. Did i mention I am a Boi major who has never taken a single writing coarse aside from the required writing coarse. I'm having to research creative writing and study the topics like archetypical characters, plot and everything else.
Now that that is over. I have already looked at the outline thread but i am wondering if i should stop, do the outline and finish world building. I already have about thirty pages of world building notes, ever changing as I add new stuff. Or should I continue and just add notes to change things like I am already doing. And the last problem. How the heck do you organize it all. I feel like i am scrolling through text to find small little details almost every page, it's getting really annoying. I have thought about compiling everything into one gargantuan document and use Numerals or bullets. Please tell me there is an easier way to do this.
Drawing the map and naming the places and characters was fun now everything sucks. I'm realizing that I may have bitten off much more than I can chew and sadly I was writing for my own enjoyment.
Any and all help extremely welcome. Anyone have books on writing that they might suggest, or topics I should research. And thank you everyone who replied to my last post, i managed to work it out quite well then came into the lovely mess I am in now.
PS sorry about the ranting, digression, and overall wall text. I think I'm done.

[Phil the Drill]

Well, I can understand your frustration. Take it from someone who has aborted dozens of 50K-70K plus manuscripts due to loss of direction or interest. Don't abandon it. Finish it even if it sucks. You'll at least have a crappy first draft. Then you can filter through the mess and find the quality stuff.

There are tons of writing books, blogs, etc. that can also help you out. Even if your manuscript is an unmitigated nightmare, the fact that you produced 91K means you have one thing already going for you: you can stick with something long enough to get that far. If you were 10K in and thought it sucked, then you could give up easier.

My advice is to push through. Then when you're finished you can edit, edit, edit.

[Kelise]

I figure out a lot of things while I'm writing, instead of planning. I often don't bother with planning because I change it all anyway!

My WIP has a dozen version where I try different characters and directions. I start with an idea, get inspiration and change it a bit, build and rewrite and come up with different endings...

I think we have to expect a dozen or so drafts, at least, especially with our first few FULL MSs.

As Phil says, we just have to keep going.

[JCFarnham]

It also sounds like you could do with some writers software, the kind which helps organise [there's a whole thread on this somewhere I suggest you check it out] or you ould make your own wiki for all these little bits of information [from now on I mean, since... 91k... yeah :P ]

Most of all If you don't think you can finish this as it is, I'm going to go against everyone else and say, why not edit what you have, consildate it and make sure you have all your errant worldbuilding tracked down and stored somewhere, then I'm almost certain you'll find the inspiration to finish it.

And if you think you'll be able to definitely come back to it [rather than forget about it] then I myself would take a break for a bit. ^_^

Just.. don't sweat it if it's lame and awful now. It's pretty much supposed to be in "first draft" form. You can make it way better. You have more than enough material to do that and best of all you've explored your characters, taken them down the wrong route, and know now where you really want them.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

On the managing-all-this-info front:

My WIP has (so far) ~124 named characters, ~58 named cities/counties/dukedoms/nations, 31 completed (first-draft) chapters. I manage all this in a single notes file, which also has a large world-building section describing the civilization I've created.

I don't create all the characters/locations in advance. They come up as I'm writing, but whenever they do, I tab over to the notes file and put them in the list. (The character list is a hierarchical bullet list, grouped by fealty/locations.) Also sometimes I'll find myself having to come up with background, e.g. just now I had to go and come up with the structure of the Royal Army, in order to better explain who would be accompanying a certain character on a journey. But that all goes into a notes file.

There's also a section that describes the political structure of the nation; what are all the dukedoms, what counties do they contain, who are the dukes/counts of each dukedom/county? This duplicates some info from the character list (which has things like physical descriptions/age/relevance to the story), but having a political reference is handy. Manually making lists of things can really help keep all those details straight. (OpenOffice, which I use, lets me create a Master document which "links" all the chapter documents. This lets me search the entire novel for a term easily.)

Here's a partial list of the header sections in the "world building" part of my notes file that talks about the nation the story takes place in:

CALENDAR
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
GUARDS
GEOGRAPHY
HISTORY
LAW ENFORCEMENT
MARRIAGE CUSTOMS
MILITARY
MUSIC/ENTERTAINMENT
NAMING
POLITICAL STRUCTURE
RELIGION
SOCIETY
TECHNOLOGY/INDUSTRY
TIMELINE
TITLES
WARDENS
WEAPONS

Each of those ranges anywhere from a few sentences to several pages. (If one file is too big, you can break it up, e.g. one file for world background, one file for character biographies/development, one file for story structure, etc.)

I also have a map that I'm manually drawing in the GIMP to give a general sense of what's where.

Really, the key is to assiduously update your notes whenever you create something new. Of all the time I've spent writing, a good 30-40% has been in the notes file, working out story issues, developing characters, building the world. This has really helped me avoid conflicts. Sometimes I'll invent something later on and I know I'll have to go back and fix it later; and even sometimes I forget that I came up with something, and I write something else that duplicates/overlaps/obviates/contradicts it. That's okay. On the next pass through, I'll catch most of those things and clean them up.


As far as backup goes, I put everything into a Subversion repository and mirror it to my desktop at work (both running Linux so this is easy). If you only really have one computer running (e.g.) Windows, the best backup practice for a novel, I think, is to zip up all your work once a week (set an alarm/reminder). Name the file with the backup date, and copy it to a USB key, or another device, or burn it to a CD if you have to.

Dunno if any of this helps, but so far I haven't had any trouble managing all this info, just by keeping it all hierarchical.

[Lord Darkstorm]

I don't remember when it hit me, probably the last time I did nano and while I completed it...I'm pretty sure I can still smell it a few years later. I know there is a certain amount of joy of exploring a world as we write it, but if you think about it, how many books we read are really random wanderings? Successful stories have a plan, and you have the fun of coming up with those ideas when you put together the plot and scenes and all the part that need to be put together into a coherent whole.

It might sound like it's constricting, but if you go into a scene with a goal, and you finish the scene achieving that goal, then the next one will follow far more easily than if you have to figure out what comes next. You can still allow some room for spur of the moment ideas, but only ones that don't break the purpose of the scene, and don't blow away all the planning already done. Then your story will move with a purpose, and by the time you finish, you should be somewhere close to where you intended to end up.

[mythique890]

The best advice I was ever given when I reached a similar point is to give your MS some time on a shelf. When you go back, you may find that things aren't as bad as you thought they were. Or, if they are, the ideas will be more mature and you may have come up with solutions to some of your problems. In the mean time, to make sure you aren't getting rusty, why don't you start a new (much smaller) project? Write a short story or a flash fiction piece totally unrelated to your novel. I didn't like the idea when someone recommended it to me, but it turned out to be the best thing I could have done. I can't tell you how good it feels to actually finish something! And as a bonus I have a story I can submit to magazines while I finish my novel.

[Rhëadïn]

Benjamin has the right of it. I do a similar thing, but I don't go as in-depth as he does. focusing on other stories is also a good idea, as mythique suggests. In my current project I'm in the hole about 15 thousand words at the moment. It is, however, made up of mostly smaller stories and poems at the moment that will have 4 long short stories or 4 short novellas (depending on how you define them) When I get tired of one, I just switch to another because they are all set at different periods in the same world it works out well enough to keep my eyes fresh.

[Qfantasy]

Sometimes it's easier just to start writing something without a plan, especially if you have the words at your fingertips just bursting to get out. It sounds like this has happened to you and although you've made a great start to your novel, it is now time to stop, take a breath, and get things organised.

My advice is to write a plan for your main plot - the beginning, middle and end and everything in between. On this plan you will then add the sub plots and their beginning, middle and ends. This does not have to be a neatly typed affair, just get the foundations in place, even if it's on a scrap of paper. I also advise you to make a list of the characters you intend to have in your novel, prioritising the main characters from protagonist to antagonist etc. Write a brief description for each character, including their motives.

This will seem like a gragantuan task but believe me, once it's done it will make completing a rough draft of your novel much easier. Try to remember that rough means rough - it does not have to be perfect and actually, it won't be perfect no matter how hard you try, so don't. Get the rough draft completed and then you go back to the beginning and rewrite what you have again and again, honing and polishing every page, paragraph and sentence until you are happy with it.

Hope this helps and good luck.

P.S. Something else I thought of, if it doesn't move the story forward, does it really need to be in there? Food for thought.

[DameiThiessen]

Leave it for a while. Finish it first if you can - if not then don't worry about it.

It sounds like you need to distance yourself and regroup. When you write for pleasure or as a hobby it's really easy to just keep writing and not have much happen. Your characters all blend together, you forget about what they story is supposed to be about, your main conflict is lost and there is no way for your story to come to a proper resolution.

When you're ready get a notebook (or a separate MW document) and list all the important information to remember as your story goes along. Names, each character's origins and motivations, a time line of events, and the main plot and subplots are all important things to focus on for starters. When you have those figured out and revised how you like it then you can continue on, but those things must be addressed if you want direction and consistency in your writing.

I hope this helps! I have had similar problems in the past.