Friday, August 24, 2007

All those unfinished books

No, I'm not talking about the ones I started to read but couldn't get into, though there are plenty of those, too.

I'm talking about all the unfinished stories sitting on my hard drive or backed up on CDs. Those ideas that seemed so compelling when they first occurred to me, but somehow never got completed.

I probably have two dozen stories I started writing but have never finished. A couple I know I'll go back to and finish. Others will remain forever half-baked ideas that never made it to the oven.

I've finished enough stories to know I can do it so it's not that I worry about never completing another one. I just wonder what happened to so many ideas I once thought would make great novels or novellas. Where did they go off the rails? Or did they?

A few got derailed by circumstances. A couple of times I had to stop writing one story to do edits on another or finish something for a deadline. Occasionally when my train of thought for a story gets derailed by circumstances, I find it hard to get it back on the right track.

Sometimes I’ve realized that I didn’t have as good a story idea as I thought and sometimes I discovered the characters weren’t right for the plot or the plot wasn’t going anywhere particularly interesting. A few crashed when I hit the wall and found I had no idea where the plot was going and couldn’t figure out how to bring it around. Others just seemed to come to a screeching halt for no apparent reason.

It’s that last group that I sometimes worry about.

Katherine Kingston

3 comments:

Denise A. Agnew said...

Katherine,

I have about six books or stories that I never finished, usually because another idea ccame along that was more compeling. I think most authors have a junk drawer like that. ;)

Denise A. Agnew

Anonymous said...

Oh, thank God! It's not just me.

Katherine Kingston said...

I'm glad to hear I'm not alone, too!

Thanks, Denise and Ann.

Katherine