I came up with a story idea a couple of days ago, but when I went to try and write it out, I ran into the same problem I have been dealing with for a while - I get to a point, and I just run out of steam.
I have about a dozen stories in more or less the same condition, but I am wondering if this is why I favor flash fiction - one way to get around the sticking point is to just end the story.
I am not desperate enough to try AI, but I am not sure what I can do.
Comments
I see nothing unusual there.
I've got you beat by one. Technically I finished one of them, but I didn't like the ending. So I was letting it percolate and then my computer crashed with my latest backup thumb drive still plugged in and I lost the ending.
That's only counting the stories that I write in this genre. I have another genre that I write in and it has sixteen.
My only hope is that I'll get bored and reread one of them and somehow jump-start the process and finish it like I did "Dumb Bet." "Dumb Bet" sat unfinished for years until I did that and it turned out to be my most liked story
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
Everyone goes through this
and I think that its absolutely fine. I remember sitting for 6 years with a couple of ideas. Then actually trying to work on TGIU and still thinking that it was bad. Then i had it beta read to some positive reactions and it went through some editing. But I was still scared of posting the story here or on FM. But I did and it saw positive responses from readers.
Its easy to get inside your own head and it does hamper the process. But I think it will all work when the mind says ok hey lets rev up the engines. Its not easy but its not the end of the world. Why not try to play with the story idea some more try to find alternatives to how you want the story to be. Somtimes things like that help trigger something inside that pushes us to try. If you dont try then you dont know where you can end up in the process.
I hope the insipiration to write comes back to you.
Why I Started Here
I had written lots of stuff, unsure what I was going to ever do with any of it, but never doing anything because nothing ever felt finished. And it wasn't. It may not work for everybody, but I wanted to present work to the world that I could be proud of, and so I started posting it here.
Once I got the hang of it in late 2022 and times I could be here during 2023, my New Year's resolution for 2024 was to post either a monthly story or weekly segments of a longer story. And that's been successful. I had one lapse in 2024 (not counting BC downtime) and I have kept the streak going since October of that year.
I had to do some sorting and cleaning up recently, and I found that prior to the start of Jody's Story (which is in progress) I had posted 26 stories in 112 posts totaling over 600,000 words. I have a couple others ready to post, a couple I am cleaning up, and at least as many as the posted stories that I haven't even started editing for posting. Of course, I start new ones as well when an idea strikes me. I know some of the writers here are more prolific than that, but it has been a comfortable pace for me.