When your WIP goes off the rails

My method is probably not helpful to anyone but me, and I'm not sure it's all that helpful to me, either. It goes like this:

Steps:

1) Keep banging head against wall until I can do no more.

2) Collapse into dark funk of despair over the foolhardy notion that I could ever be any sort of a writer.

3) Spend an extended time torturing friends and family with brainstorming-cum-therapy sessions.

4) Start over from scratch.

Notes:

a) "Scratch" may mean entirely new from word one, or it may mean starting from whatever point seemed to have been working before I got stuck or lost. It depends on just how fubar the project is.

b) Step 4 usually involves the sacrifice of at least one darling, often more than one.

Example: My current WIP is a learning experience in that it has gone off the rails about as often and as disastrously as an 1840s railroad train. To get it back on track I have had to so far:

1) Scrap three nearly complete draft manuscripts as useless.

2) Fire characters, replace them with others, fire some of those and rehire the old ones.

3) Completely rethink and replace my FMC.

4) Reinvent and refine my MMC several times, including doing some role-play team creative writing using him to develop a consistent voice.

5) Revamp the concept on which I was constructing my plot.

6) Develop new organizational techniques for keeping myself on track, too.


So... What's the nature of your problem right now?

First I try to figure out if the story's derailed or my brain. If the story, it's pretty much going back through to see where it started derailing and reworking it. If my brain, then a day or two working on something else, letting things simmer down before tackling it again.

What do you define as the wrong direction? Is the story going in a route you didn't plan?

Most recently, albeit with a short story, I had a great intellectual idea about how the timing of an event should go. So I swapped things around a bit, and then prepared to soldier on. Except that I couldn't. I'd killed it.

So, I retyped the whole thing (had written most in longhand at work at that point) and continued from the previous leaving off point, telling myself to stop interfering with what was a good thing.

I haven't yet (*knock wood*) done it with a longer work. Maybe I'm smart enough to have learned my lesson. Or maybe I've just been lucky, and must live in terror.

I'm not sure my current WIP was ever ON the rails.

Personally, my only option is to keep chipping away at it. It's hard to say or describe why, but some things just don't work. I have to keep approaching certain scenes or events from a different angle. This might mean changing which characters are where or what their attitude is towards another character. I can't seem to make this happen by logic. It can't be planned. It just takes time to test all the possibilities until I find what clicks.

Sometimes that "click" is easier to find than others.

One thing that helps me is watching a movie I love, or reading a book by an author who gets my mind working in slightly different ways. Sometimes, it's just sitting on the train and daydreaming. I HIGHLY recommend carrying a pen and paper, though. I've lost more great story ideas because I didn't write them down...

I do a rollback.

1. Save WIP as new file.

2. Identify point at which story went off the rails.

3. Delete everything after that point.

4. Start again from there.

I had to do this twice with the most recently-completed novel. I simply didn't roll it back far enough the first time. In my Twitter history there is the whole sorry story....

Sadly, when I did the second rollback, I lost a scene I later decided I wanted to use. So I can't emphasise 1. enough.

I go with it. I usually find that way, it works out better than what I intended.

I trust my brain first, after all my guts have shit for brains [*to paraphrase High Fidelity.]

OpheliaRevived said:

How do you, as writers, get back on track with a wip that has gone in the "wrong" direction? What's your method?

I'm beyond frustrated, but still so so so in love with these characters.

Click to expand...

I argue with my characters about why they went that way. *Something* convinced my fingers that the story needed a different direction, even if it winds up not working.

Sometimes, in a separate document, I'll locate the spot where the derail occurred, rewrite the way I think it should have gone, and compare.

OpheliaRevived said:

How do you, as writers, get back on track with a wip that has gone in the "wrong" direction? What's your method?

I'm beyond frustrated, but still so so so in love with these characters.

Click to expand...

Stop.

Review the inspiration that geeked me so much that I decided to write this story in the first place. Put that firmly in mind.

Read everything I've written thus far, measuring it only to the standard of whether or not it stems from the inspiration.

Note when (if ever) the story strays from the inspiration.

When finished reading: Decide which is more exciting--the original inspiration or where the story is now.

If it's the original inspiration, go back to the earliest marked point and delete everything that comes after it. That way I won't be caught up in that wrong direction again. And, yes, I do mean I delete it.

If it's where the story is going now, I note down the new inspiration for future reference and keep writing.

Usually if the story is going in the wrong direction, that means I have the wrong idea of what the story is supposed to be. Like a lot of other people have said, I'll go back to the point where things start to "go wrong" and try rewriting from there. I don't typically delete text permanently (often I'll make a cut file, or change the font color to "the light gray of impermanent letters" and move on).

I try not to hold on too hard to my ideas, because over the course of 50-70-90K words, those ideas are going to evolve, often in directions I didn't expect.

If all else fails, I like to follow the advice of James Scott Bell: "Eat a ding dong and take a nap." Best of luck!

I celebrate. There is no wrong direction, there is only a destination you didn't expect.

If you love the characters and not the plot I'd say take a step back and try to figure out where those characters belong. Take it from there.

OpheliaRevived said:

How do you, as writers, get back on track with a wip that has gone in the "wrong" direction? What's your method?

I'm beyond frustrated, but still so so so in love with these characters.

Click to expand...

What makes you so sure it's the wrong direction?

If it really, really, really, really is wrong--then back up to the last point it was right, and go a different way.

Buffysquirrel said:

I do a rollback.

1. Save WIP as new file.

2. Identify point at which story went off the rails.

3. Delete everything after that point.

4. Start again from there.

I had to do this twice with the most recently-completed novel. I simply didn't roll it back far enough the first time. In my Twitter history there is the whole sorry story....

Sadly, when I did the second rollback, I lost a scene I later decided I wanted to use. So I can't emphasise 1. enough.

Click to expand...

I did this with my WIP. I disappeared his father, changed his mother from homemaker to single mother working a crappy job.

All in all, I rewrote 5k words out of my 16k story at that point.

Follow its new track. If the quiet nerdy best friend wants to kill kittens, and he's screaming in my head "I DON'T LIKE BOOKS I LIKE KITTEH BRAINS" then it usually means that if he was real he would do that, and it works best like that. So I let him kill kittens *mwahaha*.

Also, in my last book, it was always going to be a 'kidnap-aftereffects' book, but the MC started off as just a traumatised, stammering wreck who'd lost his best friend. Then my first (and awesome) beta reader asked a question about a blackmail subplot I was thinking of, and that led me in a totally new direction. So now the MC is a traumatised, stammering wreck who's killed his best friend. *mwahaha x 2*

There are two types of wrong direction for my wips:
1) wrong moves
I plotted myself into a corner, or maybe I just lost interest in the plot. The method of dealing with it is to step back and look at the big picture, revise the concept itself, and then plot some more.
2) wrong words
Everything's under control, except it's not. Things go according to plan, character says things they are supposed to say, but it feels off. Wrong mood. Wrong style. Wrong atmosphere.
The method of dealing with it... I wish I knew it. Every story that went wrong in such a way is still sitting on my hard drive half-done.

OpheliaRevived said:

How do you, as writers, get back on track with a wip that has gone in the "wrong" direction? What's your method?

I'm beyond frustrated, but still so so so in love with these characters.

Click to expand...

What is this 'wrong' direction you speak of? I hang on and enjoy the ride into uncharted territory. I understand that this is a topic well divided between plotters and pantsers, but really, if you love your characters, don't be afraid to let them surprise you. You might like the turnout better than what you had planned. If you don't, then take some of the earlier advice and rewrite until you do like it.

Make a lot of notes in a separate document. This will help you sort out all your thoughts on what is and isn't working in your wip. Sometimes we're too close to our work and need to draw back a little.

FalconMage said:

I argue with my characters about why they went that way. *Something* convinced my fingers that the story needed a different direction, even if it winds up not working.

Sometimes, in a separate document, I'll locate the spot where the derail occurred, rewrite the way I think it should have gone, and compare.

Click to expand...

This is what I thought. There's a reason you went that way. Go back to the crossroads and take the other way and see what happens.

EmmersonGrant said:

I did this with my WIP. I disappeared his father, changed his mother from homemaker to single mother working a crappy job.

All in all, I rewrote 5k words out of my 16k story at that point.

Click to expand...

You didn't say that it worked out a lot better for the story... did it??

Stop, take a step back, and try to discover the WHY. What were your characters thinking, and what was happening that made it go off the rails? Maybe it didn't go off the rails at all, and you simply wanted it to go in a direction that the story didn't like. Plots develop a mind of their own sometimes.

I remember being so desperate for a new perspective at one point a few years ago that I actually called an ex gf and said "Hey, you were adopted, right? Were you depressed when you found out? Did you hate your birth parents or your adopted family at all?".
She hung up on me, and I realized later that I had been insensitive. That's the kind of insanity these things inspire, I guess.

I just scrap it and start all over