I Have a Problem I'd Like Some Advice About

I recently came to the conclusion that when I'm doing ideas for stories, I have no trouble starting stories, but I can't seem to bring myself to finish them. I think I may have one of those mental disorders where I can start tasks, but I can't seem to finish them. If anyone has any advice, let me know.

Comments

[Skywalker215]

Three words: Don’t give up.

[Lord Shadow Eclipse]

5685963
Thanks man

[Wildcard25]

It happens. You just got to get yourself together and think on where you want this story to go

[Lord Shadow Eclipse]

5693396
That sounds awesome. Thanks buddy!

[Nebbie]

This is a common issue among artistic types, especially those with ADHD. You'll see it a lot from high-fic-volume writers, that almost all of their stories are marked incomplete and left to sit like that.
The way I deal with this personally is to focus on the minimum size a story should be, and to always come up with a story's ending (in decent detail, like specific acts and dialog) immediately after its main premise, before anything else significant is made (even how the protagonist runs into the premise!). Then when building the rest of the story, I think in terms of what's necessary to reach that desired ending state, including characterization and tone; anything else can be thrown out pretty fast.
Another trick is to always think about a story's goal: Create feelings in the reader via creating and changing a state (even small stuff like whether a character developing by getting over a fear or disgust of something) of a fictional world. A chapter, or set of chapters, leaves the fictional world in the same state after it's done? That's a "null transaction", and has to be changed or removed. A chapter makes the reader feel nothing? Also needs to be changed or removed. This can avoid the dreaded boredom of writing "filler".

Some specific tips:

• Try to aim for chapters of around 1.5-3k words. This is where a meaningful amount of change can happen, yet things won't be hard to keep track of.
• Characters take a lot of time to introduce and even more to make the reader care about them (which is essential for a good story, every character ideally should have something to like and dislike for everyone, or they can become boring), and are a big thing for potential consequences of story events. It's best to limit them more than any other story element or else things can balloon pretty quickly.
• Relating to the above, do not be afraid to kill characters off in a measured way. In addition to just being good for providing meaningful and impactful plot turns, a death can remove a troublesome character that would otherwise make writing a story's end very hard. Just try and not be too predictable about it.
• More story can happen faster when characters are diversely extreme, as in they take highly-opposite stances on even basic things in unique combinations. Basically, you want something like Rainbow and Rarity, where the two don't even see eye-to-eye on basic everyday bodily things, to generate good conflict without a lot of work writing.

Finishing things can still be hard even doing all of this, as I know rather well, but even a little improvement can yield a big change in results because finishing a few fics can help with mood and ability to finish others.

[Lord Shadow Eclipse]

5764783
That sounds good. I think I can make use of this.