That First Story

[JBryden88]

So, I had a bit of a trip of nostalgia and I'm not sure what to do.

For the past I'd say five years, I've spent time coming up with ideas and stories and wrote a whole rough draft manuscript set in my world that is low fantasy, featuring characters based on real cultures with little magic, and so on so forth. I love that world. However, that's not where it started. Before I was enticed by the concept of a low fantasy world, I was a high fantasy fan.

I was cleaning my room this past Christmas when I came upon a dusty stack of papers. Almost two hundred and fifty pages (no print on the backs of each page mind you) of writing from when I was 15. I've said it before, I remember looking back on my original writings and was amazed at how "generic" it was. Everything from the farmhand that wants to be a swordsman to winning over the princess, to the shady assassin that turns out to be a heroic (and tragic) figure, to the cliche fantasy tropes of elves, dwarves, and orcs and magic swords and overt good/evil mentality.

Yet I've been thinking about what I did write. To give you an idea, here's the quick "summary" of what I had envisioned for this story when I was 14-15 (I'm 24 now.)

The original project was called the 10th Prophecy. The story was set on the "Overworld" which was basically like any typical fantasy world, with kingdoms and races blah blah. The idea was that the gods created the Underworld as a punishment for all the nasty things, and that there was only one way to go between worlds (Underworld was basically a copy of the Overworld, except the sky is on fire and everything is a cliche barren volcanic wasteland, yet all the geographical features are similar.) - The orcs and monsters lived in the Underworld, and were trying to find their way out.

The idea is that the Overworld had a corrupt king haunted by the spirit of a dead god (to try and break the barrier to the Underworld.) Now, the main character was a farmhand that wanted to be a swordsman. And in cliche form, the idea was that he'd come of age, prove himself, and win the favor of the evil king's pure daughter. But they'd get sucked into a rebellion against the king, and interact with elves/dwarves/and the orcs and such.

I'd say this was influenced by at the time, the Two Towers having just been released into theatres, and by the Elder Scrolls III Morrowind (my inclusion of beast races - cat men - was obvious.)

My question to you fellow writers, is, does this sound like a story that - if the proper work was given to it - could be resurrected and redone in a way that is less 14 years old cliche and more mature and possibly even good? Part of me doesn't want to abandon that old story since it IS what showed me that I could write, but part of me isn't sure if the concept is even salvageable.

Thoughts?

 

[Xaysai]

It might not be an answer that helps you, but I think that any story given "the proper work" is worth reading.

Hell, Patrick Rothfuss linked excerpts from a story he had written in high school which he gave "the proper work" and it became the beautifully written Name of the Wind, which he followed up with the bestselling sequel Wise Man's Fear.

Now, of course you want to avoid any obvious tropes or similarities to other work, but I say GO FOR IT!

 

[Chilari]

I agree with Xaysai. If you put the work in now, sure it can be good. It might change a lot in the process - you might decide to change your protagonist's background, for example, if you feel it's too cliche or would work better a different way - but there's nothing inherently wrong with your concept. With the extra decade or so of writing experience, you should certainly be a lot better now, so in principle, there's nothing to stop you.

Having said that, it's not guaranteed to work. Like you, I'm 24 and have written an awful lot of stuff since I was 15. If I were to return to the story I was writing when I was 15, though, I'm not sure I could make it work. Or for that matter any of the major stories I've worked on since then. Sure, I don't throw them away because maybe I will return to them at some point - there's one in particular I have earmarked for when I'm good enough to write it, and another I'm planning on having a shot at next year, with a teen/YA target audience - but I have in the past attempted to revive old stories and it hasn't worked. In particular the story I was writing at the age of 15 I have analysed in the past on more than one occasion and decided it will not be revivable. It was just too awful in concept - I simply failed catastophically in understanding how people react to life-shattering events - and cannot be revived.

What you really need to do is look at it in detail and think about the story and see how you can make it work. Analyse it, make notes about what you think works, what doesn't, what you want to keep in terms of themes and characters, and what you could stand to lose. After you've thought about it in some depth, you'll have a better idea of whether it will work or not. If the story hinges on a theme or concept that you thought was cool at the time but with experience (both in life and in writing) now realise is utter tripe, drop it. But if the themes and lessons are sound (not to say they're not cliche - cliche and sound are not mutually exclusive) then go for it.

 

[ThinkerX]

Yes, it can be done. In a sense, this is why I came here:

I wrote a bunch of stuff many years ago (think decades) and a little over a year ago went through it and picked out half a dozen tales I thought salvagable. Now, after more than a year on this forum recieving and offering critiques of other peoples work, and writing several additional tales...I still believe those stories are salvagable.

However, I'm going to have to kill those stories to save them. Many pages are going to be completely rewritten for better grammar, and many other pages are just plain going away. The original concepts will still be there, but most of the original prose won't be.

 

[Anders Ämting]

My first serious attempt to write a fantasy novel -I must have been around thirteen or fourteen, I think- was called The Silver Wolf and involved various races of elves but no humans. The plot was basically a long quest where a small band of heroes led by an elven prince with a crystal sword had to travel to a distant dragon's mountain to fetch... something, I can't remember what. I think it might have been part of the dragon, like a fang or a horn or something, because they needed it for a ritual or potion, or something like that.

I think I wrote like two hundred pages on that sucker, which is way more that any story I've started in recent years. I was convinced it was going to be published so I put a lot of work into it. In hindsight, it was hilariously terrible.

(Except for the crystal sword. That I stand by. Frost the magic crystal sword was awesome.)

Thing is, I think that you need to be sort of delusional right around that period of your writing career just to get through the part where you really do kinda suck at it. If I'd had any idea how far I had to go, I might have quit right there and found something else to do.

It's long since lost, probably in some scrapped outdated computer or vanished in a hard-rive meltdown. Just as well, because I don't have any desire to revive it. It served its purpose, which was to teach me how hard it actually is to write a book. Plus, my style has changed considerably since then.

 

[Mari]

I agree. I think it is worth dusting off and using those dreams of long ago, and applying all that you know now.

 

[Xaysai]

Thing is, I think that you need to be sort of delusional right around that period of your writing career just to get through the part where you really do kinda suck at it. If I'd had any idea how far I had to go, I might have quit right there and found something else to do.

This is genuinely funny.

 

[Devora]

my advice would be to find the overall plot, and grab the characters that are important, and interesting, and then write the story.

 

[Addison]

My belief is that there's no such thing as a lost story. My first story that I ever wrote and finished was, oh geez, about a decade ago. It was obviously done by a newbie preteen. An old colonial house inhabited my ninja ghosts (color coded) with a big barn full of ATV's with a sub level for those hydro-ski things. Back then I was proud, I even started a second, but now I look back and say two things; "Oh my god I was such a dope." and "Hey, I had a good idea going." Getting to the core of what the story was about I was able to resurrect it in two different ways, two different stories.

It might not become the story you'd originally envisioned but it will still have the passion, the color and the life you had intended it to have. Just go from there and it will come.

As for plots and themes, if writers didn't write their stories because someone else had already successfully written it then there would only be about a few hundred books on the library shelves since Mark Twain. It depends on how you do it; how you write it, who's in, the obstacles, how they're over come, where they're set, why the reader should care about this story to read it even though someone else has written a similar theme already.

Just write your story. If the nagging comes back pull out a different piece of paper, write it out of your system and get back to the story. Another way, which I did once and my kid brother actually enjoyed, was writing the nagging thoughts on sticky notes and putting them on his forehead and back. Other times on little pieces of paper and sticking them in the dog's collar. It's out of your head and soon out the door.