The first story I ever wrote, well, without it being a school assignment anyway, was an epic fantasy series. I didn’t have small ambitions or small ideas. Even then, without understanding it, I was a novel writer. The problem is, I never finished it. I wrote scenes and chapters–chapter 12 in book one, chapter 5 in book three. I worked out ideas, characters, and plot. I knew where it had to go, what the story had to be. Even so, I wrote only the scenes that interested me. That story is sitting in notebooks down in my basement. (Believe it or not, I hand wrote the thing.)

Now, I will never finish that long tale. Why? From time to time I think about taking it up again, but the thematic elements in that first long tale resurfaced without conscious intent in my Dreaming King Saga, like a female warrior who becomes something amazing. I handled those elements much better as a mature writer than I had as a kid. The story not so trite, not so obvious or direct in outcome.

I did, however, take some of the characters and write a novelette about one particular situation that happened somewhere in book two, in the original story.

More, there was another tale I wrote in that first universe, an epic fantasy that takes place in a 24-hour period. Now intend to write as the first book in a new series in the Dreaming King universe. Who knows if I ever will. I have so many novels to write.

At the end of the day, with that very first fantasy trilogy, I made another rookie writer error, perhaps the biggest error a beginner can make (other than not writing at all); I didn’t finish.

Quality Does Not Matter (to begin with)

Now that you’ve started your story, now that you are writing at least one sentence a day, the next step is to finish a story. Any story. Even a crappy story your mother would say was bad. This may seem as obvious as my first advice, to just write, but so many would-be writers never finish a single thing.

There are a lot of reasons writers don’t finish a story, though it’s different for an experienced writer versus a beginning writer. Beginners often jump to another story, then another after that. It’s a form of procrastination. Other times you get bogged down or bored and don’t know where to go next. Whatever the reason (sometimes can be the same reason as not writing–fear of failure and the like), what you need to do is stay on the project and power through. Write the worst story you possibly can. Make it ridiculous. But finish it before going on to that next, shiny project. Finish this one first.

Why is finishing so important? For one thing, you really can’t tell anything about a story until it’s finished. Some great stories have terrible endings. One example is the Christopher Reeve Superman movie from 1978. The movie is gorgeous and hit all the right notes. It’s the only superhero movie to date with no fights — not a single one. And yet, the ending for me, was so bad it ruined the rest of story. Others don’t mind the ending.

The converse is Robert Silverberg’s Empire of the East. The first third of the story was spent looking for this baby that then disappears, never to be heard of again. (Some of that, I think, was due to it originally being three novels not one.) The tale had many flaws, but the ending was kick-ass and pitch-perfect. Glorious.

The ending is what gives a story impact and makes it memorable.

The second reason to finish is to a story, any story, even a terrible story, is to learn to finish. It’s not as easy as it may seem, hit the right notes, don’t ramble or just peter out until you have no more words. The ending, like the beginning, has to sparkle or hit like a sledgehammer. An example is George R. R. Martin’s “Hedgeknight,” in the anthology Legends. The climactic moment is a sledgehammer. Go read it.

And since the ending is so important, you can’t get accurate feedback until you finish. A writer’s group or beta reader won’t help because the story isn’t done.

This, one of the very first writing lessons is learning to finish a story. Don’t waffle. Don’t jump from story to story when you get bored or have a little problem. Find the discipline, bull your way through if you have to, but finish. Finish even if you know it’s a pile of excrement. Struggle, scream, throw something, but finish!

No one, no editor or reader, will buy an unfinished story from you. To be a writer, you not only have to write, you have to finish what you write.

If you finish a story, even just one awful one, then you are a writer rather than someone who wants to be but can’t finish even one story. More, once you finish one, and then the next, and the one after that, you learn who you are as writer, what works and what doesn’t.

After the First

On the other hand, no longer a rookie, I have to know when to set a project aside. You needed some contradictory advice, right? This is all about why you do one versus the other. The first thing you have to do is finish a few stories. Do it until you’re sure you can write all the way to “The End.” Once you’re sure of that, sure you can do it, you’ve probably also improved at story structure and plotting. Hopefully you’ve gotten some feedback, read some books, and continued learning.

Once you have finished a number of stories, once you have honed your craft to the point you can tell a good story from a bad one, you may still find stories you can’t finish. It isn’t always the ending that stops us writers from finishing a story. I have boxes full of unfinished stories. I have a lot more finished ones in the same boxes now, though. (Not all finished stories are worth publication.) Sometimes, out there in the wastelands of the middle, you get bogged down. You have no idea what to do next, or you can tell that the story is bogged down. You, the writer, find it boring. There are many reasons we get stuck, and just as many ways to get unstuck. Sometimes, you aren’t ready to write that piece. Nancy Kress had to wait a decade after getting the idea to write the award-winning Beggars in Spain.

The thing is, if you finished that first story and the second, then you know you can finish a story. The more you finish, the more confident you become that you can in fact get to “The End.”

What comes after that is awareness. Be aware of yourself, how you are feeling about what you’re writing. It’s hard to admit your story isn’t going well but developing that sense will help you. Reading excellent fiction can help with that. Getting feedback on your own finished stories can help too. More, be aware of yourself so that you can tell the difference between a problem with the story and a problem with your attention. Professional writers can reignite their interest in a story. They can get the juices flowing again. And professional writers can tell the difference between wandering attention and a bad story. (The truth is, with practice, you will write fewer and fewer truly bad stories.)

Here are some techniques you can use to get a story going again:

  • Take a look at your idea: does it have character, conflict, a way through to the end? If so, then you went off the rails somewhere
  • Delete back to where the story was working. Start there and go a different direction.
  • Have something really bad happen to your character. (In my novel Wetware Wizards, the worst thing that could happen was the bad guys captured them. So, I had them get captured. How are they going to get out of this?)
  • Add a viewpoint character, or maybe choose an entirely different viewpoint character.
  • Get feedback: have a writer’s group or trusted friend look at what you have to give you advice. Sometimes you can just talk over the plot with someone and that’s enough.
  • You may need to power through, write crap, write boring, but write it all the way to the end. (It’s much easier to fix something that exists. It’s also easier to get feedback to see where you went wrong.)
    • Partrick Rothfuss wrote a story called “The Slow Regard of Silent Things.” He thought it was boring. He thought no one would ever want to read it, that the most exciting thing was the main character making soap. But everyone he let read it, including his editor, loved. It’s freaking marvelous.
  • If, after all that, it’s still not working, you may need to set it aside for a while. (I had one story that I tried several times, and it didn’t work. I could tell it wasn’t working, even as fairly novice writer, but I didn’t know what was wrong. Note that I finished at least one version of it. Then, after a couple decades, I figured out the problem and made it work.)

Finish First, Edit Later

There is one trap that’s easy to fall into: trying to fix the story before you’ve finished it. In part, you don’t really know enough to fix it until you’ve finished it. The other part is if you keep going back to fix things, it bogs you down. It can easily become an excuse for not finishing. “I have to fix this. I have to fix that.”

If, as you are writing, you get an “Oh, wait, I forgot…” moment, write a note to yourself and go fix that later. The ending is so critical to a story’s success that working to improve the rest before you have the ending isn’t worth your time. Okay, if it’s just a few words, I generally go back and add them, but I’ve been doing this a long time. I know myself and I know how to finish a story.

That’s leads us to one of the most important things: write in a way that works for you. For you editing as you go may be exactly what you need to do, but you can’t find that out for sure until you have finished a number of stores (even really bad stories.) If you have the confidence and experience that you can and do finish stories and you want to go back and edit while you’re writing, then do it.

Still, as a rule to begin with, make your changes, updates, and edits after you type The End.

I wrote this blog, and I didn’t like. I set it aside to think about for a couple days. I had found myself giving contradictory advice — confusing contradictory advice. When I came back, I could add clarity to it. This doesn’t mean I stopped writing, though. You can’t learn the difference between a bad story and just your attention wandering unless you first learn to finish stories.

Another learned skill is how to stop writing something to go edit another story and be able to come back to the first story.

The big point, while developing your sense of story and plot and just how to do this writing thing, is; while there are lots of reasons not to finish a story, not finishing any story, is a form of procrastination. Write your sentence a day, every day, and eventually the story will be done. Finishing stories is a mark of a professional writer.

The End.