Scrapped

John Guillen35 Comments

This will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my blog with any regularity, but I’ve now decided to officially scrap my WIP. For those who may not know, I haven’t worked on it since the first half of last year.

Now you might be wondering what makes today any different from any other day before now. It all comes down to a feeling. That’s really it. I’ve been thinking just a little about my writing lately and I’ve reached the conclusion that I can come up with a better story and write it. The thing is that no one even knew what the original story was about because I kept it under wraps except for maybe two other people. Neither of them on WordPress.

The next question I can see you twirling around your head is what I’ll be working on next. I honestly have no idea. I think I might be able to revisit something I briefly worked on in the past, but I don’t know. I’m certain I can come up with one story to write. Hopefully.

Have you ever experienced a long period of not writing? What’d you do once you came out of it? And please don’t call it writer’s block. If you want to write, then you will. If you don’t, then you won’t.

On this day in 2014 I published Blogging Isn’t Writing.

 

35 thoughts on “Scrapped”

  1. It’s super common, I think, to “scrap” projects you’re working on because it just doesn’t seem like the right time. I have two partial novels that have been “scrapped” for about 8 years, but I still have them. Sometimes coming back to it can open up things you never imaged about the story before. Just don’t throw it away!

    I agree that “writer’s block” isn’t really a thing. There’s no such thing as a “scientist’s block”, or a “teacher’s block”, and writing is what we DO. But everybody has down days. I had a period of about three and a half years where I only journaled, and didn’t put down a word of fiction. That was all due to some serious changes in my life that took a good deal of adjustment. I was even afraid that the long period spent out of writing might have completely demolished any ability I had.

    The one thing I remember doing that bust me out of that dry spell was just starting to call myself a writer. I went to parties, met new people, lived in a new town, and when asked what I did, I told them, “I’m a writer.” I didn’t need to tell them that I hadn’t actually written a word in such a long time, and when I saw that my answer made people smile, their eyes growing wide with surprise and interest, it hit me. Nobody was going to question me at that point, and I think after that it only took a few weeks for me to get back into fiction writing every day. It’s important for us to be able to show ourselves to the world, who we know we are, without giving our self-prescribed labels “minimum requirements”. Those come later.

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    • I LOVE this comment. But I’m a little embarrassed to admit that whenever someone does ask me about my writing (which isn’t often but does happen) I usually shoo them away or tell them not to ask about it. I need to just accept that I haven’t in a long time, and move on. I’m still a writer.

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  2. I went for nearly a year without writing once. I had about 5 chapters of a novel written in a notebook, which was then stolen from a classroom I left it in. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t continue without them, and I couldn’t recapture what was already written. It was awful.
    During that time I wrote a lot of angry, terrible poetry. And I mean terrible.

    But I read a lot of books in that time. And one morning I woke up, after finishing my favorite book for like the fourth time, and knew I was going to write fiction that day.

    And despite the occasional break during editing sprints, or high demand school projects, I haven’t looked back.

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      • The first novel I ever attempted to write made it about 25,000 words, and then I scrapped it. That’s when I figured out that I had to write from beginning to end. I wrote the ending and the story was done, even though I’d never hashed out the middle.

        All you can do is treat then as learning experiences. Think about what made you stop, what keeps you from finishing it? Not from the perspective of overcoming it, but of avoiding it next time.

        Since I lost that notebook, I write rough drafts on my computer, and I back up to an external hard drive at least once a month.

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      • I’m really not even sure I know why I can’t finish it. Maybe I write myself into a corner and have no idea how to get out? I don’t know. But hopefully I can learn from it and avoid a similar situation in the future.

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  5. I have yet to scrap a story I’ve written, but then again, I haven’t written many. However, I tend to go long periods of time taking breaks in my writing. When I get back to it, I’ve been lucky to continue where I left out without feeling lost in what to write about. But like other commenters said, I’ve scrapped many projects before, such as video games, visual stories, and videos, so I definitely support the idea of doing so if you feel you can focus your attention on other projects that interest you more.

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  6. I don’t ever scrap anything. I don’t necessarily love it or even finish it, but I keep it, because I figure I wrote it for a reason and maybe one day I will even figure out what that reason was.

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  7. That’s exactly what’s happening to me now. I can’t remember the last time I sat down to write my novel that I’m currently working on. At the moment it’s swirling through my brain, and I feel like I need to start writing again. However, I have a conflicting feeling that I can’t write either, and match that up with the amount of assignments for school I have to finish in a week’s time makes it even harder to give myself space to sit down and write.

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    • I know. I remember your post that said you were restarting your book. But I never wrote a single word of fiction until after I was a college graduate. So I have no excuse or reason not to be writing right now. I’m just not.

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  8. I went for almost 8 years without writing. I couldn’t speak my truth, and the words dries up. When I started writing again, I wrote it out in a notebook… and only because I couldn’t wait to see where it was going. Turns out, it was my first paid short story to be published. When I felt the fiction well start to dry up recently, I switched to writing something else…. and now I’m writing every day again .

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  9. I’ve scrapped numerous story ideas. Dozens of them for my current fantasy series, too. It’s just a matter of finding what works best, and it’s not always the first story idea we came across or started writing.
    I’ve gone almost a full year without writing anything. I didn’t do it intentionally, the time just went by faster than I thought and before I knew it, I’d gone a year without a single word added to any of my stories. I wasn’t mad at myself, it just didn’t happen.
    So I re-read some of what I’d written and decided if I loved it or hated it. Then I’d move on in that project or write something completely different.

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