WIPs? What WIPs? I never! (in which the author overuses emphasis italics)

[shivver]

Last week in ushobwri, they mentioned looking back in old folders and finding stories that you wrote but don't remember, reading old stories and going "wow, did I really write that?" and looking back at old ideas that you started but never finished. I started thinking about the fact that I haven't written anything for David despite the fact that I still have tons of ideas for him in my braims (and one completely written first draft that simply needs editing, though I admit it needs tons of it), I never finished the "Calling the Doctor" series, and I totally forgot about "A Teacher and a Housemaid."

Then bas_math_girl started posting her new Doctor/Donna-in-a-Regency-AU story, and that reminded me that I have a 1/3-done "the Doctor and Donna meets Jane Austen" story. That one is completely plotted out in my brain, but never made it onto paper. Well, e-paper.

This only serves to remind me that at one point, I counted over fifty WIPs in my Google docs, ranging from single-paragraph starts to multiple chapters that somehow got abandoned. And this doesn't count that I've been trying to finish this one that I keep hinting at in my journal posts.

I want to write. I just never do it.

I find that if I do actually write, it's only if a prompt at who_contest grabs me, or if some idea pops up that I just can't let go of. If I do pick up a WIP, I read through it to figure out where it's going, and by the time I get to the end, even if I know what happens next, I wander off.

Feh. This is just me whining about my lack of motivation. :)

There's one multi-chapter 3/4-done story that I know why I won't finish it. It's set in the real world, and when I wrote the first draft, I had assumed that the real world setting worked like this. Then I discovered that it worked like that, so I rewrote the entire thing to make it work correctly. Then I found out that no, I was wrong: at the time that this thing was set, it worked like this other thing. I have not gotten up the motivation to re-write the entire thing yet again. :P

Comments

[unfeathered]

You are not alone! I’ve been going through some of my old docs too and found dozens of things I could work on, many of which I don’t even remember! I’m trying to put them all in one folder so I can look through them when I have a gap and try and write some of them, though I do suffer from the same problem of getting to the end and then can’t be bothered!

[shivver]

You know, I really should do that - go through all the old docs, put them in a folder of unfinished stuff (some of them already are - I did this back in like 2015). And then I should list down all the ones that I really do want to finish, so that I have something to remind me of them.

Whenever I look at my long multichapter fics on AO3, I wonder to myself how I ever actually wrote that much.

[paynesgrey]

Yeah, I'm with you there. Looking at old WIPs or even thinking about them, I really want to finish them, but actually doing it is much harder. It's definitely a motivation thing...