: Re: How do I finish my stories although I have both ideas and titles for them? Almost every day I come up with new titles and rough ideas for new books to write. I e-mail them to myself, happy

@Holmes449

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My view:

To get yourelf to do something, there has to be some reward in it--a reward for you. And I'd go further--a reward for your brain. People get burned out at many jobs despite the reward of a paycheck, because their brain is numb to the paycheck and needs some other reward.

It sounds like you got lucky and for your existing books, you were rewarded all the way through--the excitement didn't ebb.

Now you're not getting that immediate reward. You keep switching to a new idea because the excitement rewards you in the beginning, and then the reward ebbs, and then you go on to the next new, rewarding thing. But until you find a way to deal with the ebbing-reward part of writing the novel, you're not going to get the lasting reward of finishing one.

So my advice is: Find a way to sufficiently reward yourself while sticking with one novel.

That's what has gotten my novel close to a finished first draft, and what I hope will get me to the end of that first draft. I discovered what rewards me. Rewards for me include:

1) Writing the scene that most fits and satisfies my current emotional state. If I feel deprived, if I feel frustrated at work, if I feel unsafe, if I feel free and happy, I write a scene that fits that feeling. I magnify the feeling--I may feel unsafe because my boss's email might have sounded a little curt, and the resulting scene may have life-threatening violence. The point is that riding with the flow of my current emotions is experienced by me as rewarding.

2) Polishing each scene as I finish it. In practical terms, this is a complete waste of time. Roughly half of those scenes get thrown away--partly a consequence of (1), partly a consequence of (3), partly because I'm a discovery writer who writes out of order. But reading a good polished chunk of my writing pleases me, and that's a reward.

3) If I can't write a scene that I need, I write whatever I darn well please, but it must be within the confines of the story. It must occur after the novel's beginning, before the novel's likely end, and it must involve at least one of the characters. This gives me rewards (1) and (2), and keeps me in the writing habit, and keeps me in the current story. And surprisingly often, I find that the scenes actually do fit in the story. I suspect that this is because if I want to write a scene despite seeing no purpose for it, there's some enjoyable "punch" about the scene that, once it's written, I discover a use for.

Those are MY rewards. I think that you have to find YOUR rewards, designing them to keep you writing one story until it's done.

Well, one or a very small number--it's possible that you might find the freshness of hopping from one story to another rewarding to your brain, sort of like hybrid vigor in corn. I absolutely wouldn't recommend it, but if you find that you simply can't keep your brain sufficiently rewarded with one story, you might try it.

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