Round 47, Hour 22

[pitry.livejournal.com]

So here's the question. How much momentum do you need in writing? Can you leave aside a long fic you've written for 6 months and then just get back to it, re-read it and be reminded of what went on there and keep on writing? Or do you need to sustain a certain momentum, and if you've reached the point you haven't touched anything for months and can't remember the details, it's lost and will never be finished? I belong to the latter group, I must admit.

Comments

[burning-night.livejournal.com]

(Ah I see why the question was sparked by what I said now!)

I personally can jump back into something as long as I'm feeling inspired to write it. I usually re-read whatever it is to get the feeling of it back and so I don't screw anything up by not remembering details. Also I write a lot of plans so I often still have an idea of where I'm going.

[xandromedovna.livejournal.com]

ugh... I'm definitely the latter, mainly because by the time I return to it I'm a completely different person and I no longer have any connection to the material. It's really frustrating because then I never finish anything.

Fortunately, not finishing isn't an option right now. Despite the amount of banging my head against this fic I've been doing the past hour.

[eve11]

I am in it for the long haul. Mostly because with the stories I'm writing, they will simmer in my brain for a while (days, weeks, months) until I write anything, and by the time I have enough written down to have a WIP, there is much more in my head that isn't written involving plot, theme, etc, with its own little feedback loop that pops pretty quickly back to mind when I open the stories. So I can put them aside for a good long while and then take them back out and look at them.

However, I do admit that I am not very good at finishing stories. But generally for these ones that I have snippets of, looking over the snippets and any notes that I wrote down is enough to remind me where I was in writing the story and at least picking it up and trying to continue it.

[lolmac]

I'd better be the former, because I went on hiatus halfway through Spider's Web and I really, really, really don't want that to be an unfinished work. In addition to the fic to re-read, I also have a LOT of notes, research materials, and partial scenes, so I've got a good deal of material for getting restarted.

On the other hand, the Epic Post-Gauda-Prime Mary-Sue-driven Blake's 7 fix-ALL-the-things fic that I started a few decades ago and abandoned out of sheer self-disgust at not being able to not write it as a Mary Sue . . . that one will remain forever unfinished, as well as unseen.