Random Thoughts: Cancelled Stories

There’s been a number of things I’ve been wanting to discuss somewhere, so I’ve been pondering doing a bit of a ‘column series’ about my random thoughts of various things related to MLP and/or fanfiction. If nothing else, it’ll be something you might want to read while you wait during these (unfortunately) increasingly long breaks between chapters. Though on that note, I should mention that I am still working on the next one. Unfortunately, repeated cases of writer’s block have slowed down progress, but I’m hoping to get it done soon… ish.

But anyway, as of late I’ve been trying to go through my “Read It Later” list and am happy to report I’ve finally gotten it down to less than 600 stories (yay?). Really, my method is just to go to Random.org to pick random numbers and then choose that story number in the Read It Later list so that I get a mix of newer and older ones.

Of course, some of the stories, once picked, I simply remove and don’t bother reading. Why? Because they haven’t been updated in years, and there’s not much point trying to read a story that’s almost certain to not ever be completed.

In fact, considering how many of these just had a handful of chapters before being abandoned, I might as well give a bit of advice to future or current fanfic writers. My suggestion is to make sure you have a commitment to a story, be sure to write a decent amount of it before posting anything. If it’s going to be a relatively short story (say, less than 15,000 words), then have the whole thing written before posting. You can still put it up in chunks, and may even want to do some rewriting of subsequent portions before posting them based on feedback, but having the whole thing ready to go will ensure you don’t leave readers hanging.

Of course, some stories are much longer than that, and it’s generally very hard to write up a lengthy fanfic all in one go before posting any of it. For such cases, I recommend trying to write a decent amount of it, again to make sure you have some level of commitment to it. This can’t guarantee you’ll finish it, but it at least shows it won’t be something you’ll write a chapter or two of, then lose interest. There’s no magic number to suggest you get to, but like above, 15,000 words is a good amount to ensure you’re much less likely to abandon it faster. Quite a bit of Friendship Is Absurd was actually written before anything was posted. Specifically, the first 9 chapters were all written, fulfilling the aforementioned 15,000 requirement (I think it was a little over 25,000). Mind you, I did actually do some extra editing of the already-written chapters before posting them, but they were at least in a decent form when I put up the first chapter.

Another advantage to making sure to write a decent amount before posting it is that you can then go back and make changes to earlier chapters if you find the direction of the story makes you want to rewrite things. You can theoretically do that with published chapters, but it can be irritating on the reader to make anything more than cosmetic changes.

But there’s something that’s probably more frustrating than a story that’s abandoned early; a lengthy, complex story that’s abandoned entirely. At least a story abandoned early on will be less likely to get you invested in it, but after going through hundreds of thousands of words to not get a conclusion? That’s rough. Luckily, it hasn’t really happened to me so far; okay, there have been a few lengthy stories I read a lot of and then were abandoned, but the handful of such stories that applies to were ones I was ironically losing interest in anyway and thus am less “hurt” by the cancellations. Still, I’m sure some people were much more into them, and it’s really frustrating to read a 600,000+ word story, only for it to just abruptly stop updating without any communication or explanation from the author.

Now, I’m not trying to criticize writers for losing interest in a story. That just sometimes happens, and it’s rare you’re making money from fan fiction so that motivation is gone. If you just can’t get yourself to write the rest of the story, that’s fair, and forcing yourself to write can often have bad results for the writing itself.

However, I feel like an author, particularly after having the readers go through so much, owes it to the readers to provide a conclusion by explaining what they were going to have happen in the story. Some authors actually have done this, making a blog post or an author’s note explaining how the rest of the story would go, or at least what they did know would happen even if they hadn’t worked out everything. This can give readers their resolution without the author having to go through the rigamarole of actually writing out the entire story and instead only having to write up a synopsis. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to happen that much. As a note, if you do this, it really helps to make the place where you detail the ending obvious, either an author’s note in the final chapter or a link to the applicable blog post in the description being good choices.

Now, a counterpoint might be that the author, while not being able to get themselves to write it, hopes to return to it in the future and complete it. And indeed, there have been cases where after a lengthy hiatus, the author returned and completed the story. In that case, putting up a big spoiler explaining what was going to happen could be a problem because you might come back and finish it later, and it’s much harder to enjoy a story if everything’s been spoiled for you. In cases where you at least mean to come back and finish it, I can understand not wanting to write up such a post. Still, even in such cases it’s a nice thing to do to let your readers know that’s what the situation is.

But then you have the cases where the story is just obviously not going to be finished, possibly by the author’s own admission, and they leave with no information. If the story is not particularly plot-based that is acceptable, if not preferred. If I were to abruptly announce that Friendship Is Absurd is cancelled and no new chapters will come, I’m sure some people would be disappointed there wouldn’t be more chapters, but there’s not really much that’s unresolved at this point (though I do have a few plans for the future I would divulge). But a lengthy, plot-based story? That needs a resolution of some kind.

There are a number of lengthy stories that have the Cancelled status and no explanation as to what was going to happen. While I do appreciate the author communicating via the Cancelled status that the story is done, I don’t think it means much if they don’t tell people what was going to happen. That, to me, is just plain obnoxious on their part. It is not that difficult to write a few paragraphs explaining where the plot and characters were going to go, and it will be good for your readers. So if you have to cancel or abandon a story, particularly a lengthy one, I strongly advocate that you explain what was going to happen in the rest of the plot (even if you didn’t have it all planned out, giving some details is better than nothing).

So, that’s the extent of my ramblings and random thoughts on unfinished stories. I don’t know if I actually said anything worth reading in all of this, but it helped to at least put it all to paper. If you want the strong takeaways, it’d be this: Write a decent amount of your story before putting any of it up to help ensure you have the commitment to keep it going, and if you have to cancel a story, you really should put up an author’s note, blog, or even just a comment to explain what you had planned in order to give readers resolution.