Do you ever work on things that come to nothing?

[Will]

Does that ever happen to you? It's quite depressing when it does. Some days you're working away, typing/writing, with great ideas in mind. The next week you just get a feeling like "nah, this is all wrong". Not ideal.

[BeigePalladin]

All the time, but then thats life; I doubt theres anyone who can say every decision they've made and everything they've worked on was correct and came to full completion etc

[ThinkerX]

I've written hundreds of fragments down through the decades which did not go anywhere. Some are short, crude scenes of just a couple hundred words; others are semi-polished near novels.

[Helleaven]

Yeap happens to me so often. On the other hand, you can turn it into your advantage. Take the parts which you like and write them into somewhere to use later. For example, you write a few pages but in the end it has not become the result you dreamt of. Not all of it could be bad. There would be some sentences, some metaphors, some clever word games which you like seperately.

Note them to use them later. I did that a few times; 10 pages go to waste bin, but a few parts of them still remains in a document for future use. At least, that's what I do when it is a complete waste of time.

[SlimShady]

All the time. But, I typically find myself reusing some stuff in different stories. At least something is usually salvageable.

[Eeirail]

It is just the cycke of creation, yes it hurts, but it helps.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Yep, it's just part of creation. I've probably thrown out 50,000+ words' worth of prose from my NIP (not including rewriting, just straight-up chapters that didn't work).

One piece of advice I read a long time ago was, when writing, to write each thing in ten different ways, to make sure you've found the best possible way to say it. (Or at least, to improve the chances that you've written something good.) This means that you'd be throwing away 90% of what you wrote, and keeping only the best 10%. It's time-consuming, but good advice.

[Ophiucha]

Sure, though I do often recycle ideas or worldbuilding aspects from them for later works, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. The worst things for me are the ideas and stories that are totally workable, but... something in the way I write or work just doesn't make me and my story compatible. I have certain writing techniques and favour certain sorts of description, and sometimes I have ideas for a story that just don't work with how I write. That sucks, because I don't want to just salvage it for parts when it's a damn good idea on its own, but at the same time, it's just going to sit there forever, unwritten.

[ethgania]

Definitely.
My main problem is that I'll try and write something other than my main world that I've been working on for who-knows-how-long and then somehow it gets sucked in to my other work... then I get frustrated and either toss it or put it on my already over-crowded backburner!

[Claire]

Oh yes, definitely. But they have all been good learning experiences, and like others, I've taken ideas from them and brought them forward into my current piece.