Story Overload

[Greninjaman]

Let's say one starts a story, then starts another and so on until they have a ton and then gets overwhelmed by the sheer number that they have. What should they do? Should they just clear out all the stories and just focus on the one that interests them the most?

 

[galacticarticuno]

Being someone who writes a ton of fanfiction and stupidly keeps getting into the boat you describe, I would suggest picking one or two that you like the most, setting the others on the backburner. Currently, myself...I update one story whenever I bloody feel like it and got one story (a story people really want) on the back burner but is being written in a notebook until I get the first story (a novella) finished. Currently I got six stories (two are crossovers) and then anything I am not working on got shoved to a different folder on my laptop.

Hopefully, if people like your stories, they can be patient and wait for updates. Somehow, I have at least one reader who sticks around despite my lack of updates. But yes, I would suggest from experience, pick one or two if it strikes your fancy out of the stories you have and focus on that.

 

[LightningTopaz]

I am guilty of this problem too, and I've found that sticking to one or two on a schedule helps.

 

[Greninjaman]

I am guilty of this problem too, and I've found that sticking to one or two on a schedule helps.

Yeah. Sticking to one or two sounds like less of a headache than having multiples at once...
Especially if they are all the same thing (All Pokémon, All Legend of Zelda, all Mario, and so).

 

[Juliko]

I often suffer this problem as well. I get a ton of ideas, but I often don't have the motivation to complete them. Some stories I had to outright abandon because either inspiration petered out, canon rendered them moot, or because the story ballooned out of control for me to handle. I've made it a point to only churn out the stories that I really, really want to write and limit it to just one or two at a time.

 

[Greninjaman]

I often suffer this problem as well. I get a ton of ideas, but I often don't have the motivation to complete them. Some stories I had to outright abandon because either inspiration petered out, canon rendered them moot, or because the story ballooned out of control for me to handle. I've made it a point to only churn out the stories that I really, really want to write and limit it to just one or two at a time.

Those are certainly factors that cause a story to be dropped. What ways can we prevent that from happening?

 

[LightningTopaz]

@Greninjaman

Know the size of the scope before going in. A wise artist once said that it's easy to put stuff in, it's harder to take stuff out. So resist the urge to throw in everything but the kitchen sink in your story.

 

[Greninjaman]

@Greninjaman

Know the size of the scope before going in. A wise artist once said that it's easy to put stuff in, it's harder to take stuff out. So resist the urge to throw in everything but the kitchen sink in your story.

Yeah. Knowing roughly how many chapters your story should have is a good idea. This will also help with keeping the scope from getting out of hand.

 

[CynthiaLover]

I've been guilty of this, especially in my earlier writing years, though it still rears its head every now and then. It often causes some series to get suspended, canceled, or even die in the prototype stages because I overcomplicated things. That last one actually happened fairly recently with an earlier series that I was planning to do after Chaos Rising was finished. I ended up throwing so many ideas into it that it became one ginormous mess, forcing me to scrap the entire idea and start a different prototype idea with a blank slate (albeit I did salvage a few ideas from the failed prototype and reworked them a bit into the new prototype idea, thus allowing earlier ideas to be effectively reincarnated).

Generally, from what I've learned in my many years of writing is that you need to focus on only one series at a time, especially if it's a long-lasting one (not counting one-shots and such), and put everything else on the backburners until you're ready to tackle them. That doesn't mean you can't brainstorm possible ideas for the other stuff, just don't let it get in the way of the main project at hand. In cases like that, it's best to just jot them down somewhere and file them away for later while you focus more on your main writing project. If one is capable of multitasking then you're free to jump back-and-forth between the two, but I recommend that if you do that you don't do any more than two different projects at once, otherwise they might interfere, or even unintentionally blend ideas together, with the other.

Keeping a set goal in mind can help, such as how long you want it to be or how much you want to do within a certain timeframe. Stuff like that can help keep the creativity gears greased and help keep motivation up. Another thing I've come to feel is that if things start to snowball out of control and create situations like this it's best to step away from it for a while to clear your head and reaffirm what you want to prioritize. Doing so can help maintain focus. Also, don't try to do everything in one sitting. I often do my writing in short, controlled bursts, such as writing a few chapters within a week, taking a break for a few days to recharge, rinse and repeat. It helps keep things organized without burning yourself out too quickly. But generally do whatever works best for you. Developing a writing "rhythm" of sorts can help, but it ultimately boils down to your particular style and methods.

But my general advice is focus on one series idea at a time (or two if you can juggle that) and put everything else on hold. But jot down any ideas that could work with said ideas and tuck them away for later so when you're ready to tackle it you'll have enough resources to give you a head start. That's what I try to do. I'm not always successful but I at least try to learn from my mistakes and not let such scenarios snowball out of control to the point I'm overwhelmed. Prioritize what's most important to you and resist the urge to do double-duty. That's what advice I can give due to my own experiences. The rest is up to you.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

Ah, one of the great elephants in the room when it comes to writing fanfiction, especially if you’re someone who happens to be blessed — or in certain circumstances, cursed — with the gift of an overactive imagination. So many ideas and yet so few chances for many of them to ever be brought to life, let alone for them to be given a satisfactory life. As for my experiences with this, well… as I’ve found to be usual with threads like this, prepare for a bit of a long one here.

Although it’s really only now that I’ve started to fully realize the pitfalls of working on too much stuff at once, I think that a certain part of my mind already knew that a long time ago. You see, my current “big” project is Mirror Adventures: A Tragedy of False Smiles, a story that essentially revolves around XY037’s concept of characters with opposite (or “mirrored”) personalities and explores the effects of that on the Pokémon world and the stories told there on an epic and sweeping scale, way beyond that of the original episode. And that’s certainly a highly ambitious project that’s going to take me a massive amount of investment and effort to complete in any satisfying way, but it isn’t the only one that I had in mind at one point. There happened to be another idea that could’ve been my “big” project here instead, one that’s been in my head in one form or another for literally almost two decades now: a journey fic revolving around the Johto protagonists — among many other characters — that also tells its story on an increasingly epic and sweeping scale, beyond even the very concept of a journey fic itself.

At some point while I was planning out how I was actually going to turn my ideas into reality here at the Writers Workshop, I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to complete both projects in any reasonable amount of time, by virtue of the inevitable fact that simply completing one of them was insane enough of an endeavor on its own. My heart went back and forth between the two several times, but in the end — and for reasons that I still don’t completely understand — my mind settled on Mirror Adventures, and so here we are with that today.

Now, perhaps in fear of having that kind of dilemma happen to me multiple times with the very overactive imagination that I’m indeed both blessed and cursed with, I’ve developed a system of sorts as to how and when I allow myself to begin certain writing projects. Similar to how the Pokémon movies are referred to as “Pikachu Project (so-and-so year)” based on the year that each one of those movies — emphasis on “one” — appears, each of my writing projects are referred to in my mind as “Bakuphoon Projects (so-and-so-year)”. As part of this naming scheme, I try to have exactly one project that I start working on each year, and no more than that. Mirror Adventures: A Tragedy of False Smiles, having been started in 2019, is basically “Bakuphoon Project 2019”. Broken (a Spell of the Unown AU one-shot), having been written in 2020, is “Bakuphoon Project 2020”. And any number of things could have been “Bakuphoon Project 2021”, but then certain things… happened in real life that year, let’s just say. As of now, I consider my B2W2 shipping fic idea to be the de facto “Bakuphoon Project 2021” by virtue of me coming up with the idea within that year, although it could just as easily end up being “Bakuphoon Project 2022” depending on what else I’m actually able to bring to the table by the end of this year.

That said, I’m not exactly rushing to have anything happen at this point. If what I’m currently going through right now in real life has taught me anything (besides “strike while the iron’s hot”: something for me to elaborate on another time), it’s that no matter what your desires are and how much you really want to get something out there right now!!!, the reality is that two things come first before anything else: 1) your sanity and mental health, and 2) your true willingness to do the hard, nitty-gritty work needed to turn an idea into something real. Because as wonderful as ideas are, let’s not delude ourselves: ideas, by themselves and left by themselves, are largely worthless. It’s only when they become real that they have any actual impact or consequence, and turning an idea into something real is never easy, even for the best of us at the best of times. And at the worst of times, there‘s always that nagging feeling that perhaps all of our squeeze isn’t actually worth the juice after all, so to speak. And even if deep down we want it to be worth it, much of the time our minds just say, “stop it already, it’s not worth it!”. And so with the death of our drive comes the inevitable death of our stories in turn, killed by neglect and apathy of the least malicious yet no less destructive sort.

Ultimately, this is why most journey fics and anime rewrites in particular either end up unfinished or not exactly what their authors initially envisioned they would be like, I think. They underestimate the sheer amount of hard, nitty-gritty work required for such massive projects, and then inevitable breakdown takes its toll before too long. It’s for this reason that although I have practically endless ideas swimming around in my mind that I’ve already imagined as something “real”, I rarely “put it out into the universe”, so to speak, until I’m at a point where I seriously believe that I can actually make it “real”. So when I keep mentioning that B2W2 shipping fic over here, for instance, it’s not just because I’m saying: “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if I wrote a story with so-and-so premise?”. It’s because, as of now, I actually believe that I’m going to write it, finish it, and post it in the very near future. And if I didn’t end up writing it for some reason, then I’d consider that a failure on my part; not just because, obviously, that I failed to write it, but also because, in failing to write it, I essentially failed to fulfill a promise to myself just as much as I failed to fulfill that silent promise to those around me (in this case, the community here) by “putting it out into the universe”.

So with all of that said, my advice for avoiding the pitfalls of “story overload” is to start with one question that I believe every fanfic writer should ask themselves before dedicating themselves to making an idea into something real: how long is it really going to take me to do this? And then, however long you determine that will be, ignore that, and instead treat things as though it’ll take you at least twice as long to do it, if not more. Because no matter how pure your intentions are or how dedicated you are to making your ideas real, there is one universal truth to fanfic writing, any kind of writing, any kind of project, or even life in general: nothing will ever go exactly as planned. You will get sidetracked, you will lose inspiration, and you will have something happen to you in real life that will completely throw you off at least once, if not many, many times. And all of these things will, at the very least, slow you down or even threaten to stop you altogether… and that’s just for one project, let alone multiple ones! Given all of that, I’d then say that you should ask yourself this: are you willing to hold yourself responsible for turning all of your ideas into something real, including the consequences for failure both in real terms (not keeping your promise to all of the readers who will never see the end of your story) and in personal terms (not keeping your promise to yourself)? Answering that in particular, I think, could go a long way in keeping yourself from investing in too many projects at once (or even a single potentially problematic project), but your mileage might also vary, I’d imagine. Hopefully what I wrote provides some decent food for thought on the matter!

 

[Greninjaman]

@LightningTopaz
While I did say that you should know roughly how many chapters your story should have, nothing is stopping you from adding/removing chapters.