A Quick Question · 5:04pm Jun 19th, 2018
First, a mandatory apology. I’ve been - well, gone’s not quite the word. Skulking is more apt, I think. My heart was so set on doing stuff with the one story I’ve got posted here that I never even thought anything could interrupt that. Well, as life is wont to do, it got in the way. Now it’s... what, one, two years later (?) and I started thinking about updating.
Here’s the fun bit: I have no idea how to go about writing like I used to. I know, crazy that a person’s style could noticeably change in that gap. Yet another thing I did not anticipate, even though it would have been obvious to any other human with even a fifth of a brain to call their own.
So, before I post a different type of mess on top of the mess that’s already present and turn it from subpar riffing material to a horrible stew of clashing tones and styles where the before and after are more pronounced than in those ads that keep trying to sell me beauty cream and PhotoShop at the same time, I have to ask for a little advice.
Of course, given the small number of people that’ll read this, I’d probably be better off posting this same question in one of the writing or assistance groups, but I thought, “Hey, better to try it out on Home territory before journeying into parts unknown where there exists the possibility of grievous harm to my ego,” so that’s why I’m posting here first. Of course, I’ll probably end up migrating to a group anyway since that is sort of what the development groups are here for.
Okay. Enough rambling. Here’s the question I actually came here to ask before writing an essay: should I continue with what I have, (taking note of the fact that I write and think pretty differently and regard everything from before as having come from something alien that took up residence in my head for a time), or should I just do a rewrite that sticks to the plot I had set up beforehand (which I still remember, in case that’s a potential issue)?
So, 20 words or less: Reread your story, try to copy the form you have in a short, or start over.
4885709
Thanks for the answer, it definitely helps. I have tried to replicate the way I used to write, but it’s hard in a way I never thought it’d be. After all, it was my style a short while ago, if anyone knew how to copy me I’d expect it to be me. Then again, it’s also my first attempt at a story, so I suppose that change was not just inevitable, but bound to be rapid as I practiced. In all honesty, I probably should have held back on actually committing to posting anything a bit, at least until the tone had stabilized somewhat so my stuff didn’t read like an attention-deficit nine-year-old on a sugar high one moment and a lobotomized Poe-Lovecraft-Stross bastard child the next.
It’s more than just the style change, though; the lack of focus and clear direction is something I regret. That’s a large part of why I’m considering this in the first place. To me now it feels like, “starting in griffonplace and now we’re at the castle but now it’s changelings and Applejack and Fluttershy are dead wink and now zombies and weird windows and yes let’s stupidly crawl through and die but we’re alive and derpy.” It’s just bouncing around with no aim and no goal. By at most the fifth chapter people should have at least some suspicion of the beginning aim, but not so for past me. They believe in mystery; that is to say, they believe in stringing together the most nonsensical random events and calling it a mystery. The story itself is a mess that either needs to be put out of its misery or be given a complete overhaul.
It hurts to read through it now. Honestly, just to save people from having to waste minutes of their lives that they’ll never get back on something not worth the time it takes to read, I’d like to give it another go.
4885753
So uh, yeah, start over then. There used to be another story on my page that I took out behind the barn and shot for essentially the same reasons. There were good ideas in there, and those ideas found their way into Super, but the story itself had to die and eventually I removed it from my page entirely.
It had a direction but it got lost in itself too often and that was something I made sure to not let happen in Super, so Super had an outline with most every chapter planned ahead and then an outline rewritten every couple chapters to make sure the future chapters align with the rest of the story. In it's current place, these last few chapters didn't exist in the initial outline but needed to happen before a certain point, so they got moved up to now.
The next fight in the story was like, a one sentence outline chapter a while ago, but now that I've gotten close to it, that outline has a lot more information than it did a while ago. If you make sure to keep up with it, that should help keep your story in line.