Spiralling. Capital S. And how to know when you're done.

Every time I've set myself to writing, be it FF or OF (though it's a particularly menacing problem in OF) I try to set myself with the plot. Beginning, middle, end, Yadda Yadda intended caps. The problem is that by the time I've set myself on a course I'm happy with it's already began to change.

A new idea will suddenly change the course of the ending. This will in turn change an aspect of the antagonist, then the antagonist entirely. Perhaps the antagonist will shift sides be become positive while something more sinister emerges.

By this point even the protagonist has a chance of being changed completely and the Spiralling has fucked the entire course of my story, consigning months of thought to the bin. This is the point where I usually shelve it for another few months out of sheer frustration.

Does this happen to anyone else and how do you keep your hands on a story that keeps shedding its skin and slithering the fuck away from you?

 

For me it's just part of the process. The trick is to take notes about your plans and the deviations from them so you have something to check against when going back for edits.

You're always going to write extra content which will be discarded. This is natural - you get raw ore and then refine it later. Trying to write the final version in your first draft will always be an exercise in frustration.

A story is written in a linear fashion. Changes propagate forwards and backwards, Be mindful of whether you're changing plot to fit a character or rewriting the character to fit the plot, though. Otherwise it can sometimes lead to a story feeling less like a complete entity and more a series of random events.

I think of it like levelling up in an RPG only to find a really cool rare item which suits a different build entirely. You want to try it out, sure. It's new and exciting and seems like fun. But you don't want to consign all that effort to the bin, so you reroll, fuck around for a bit, then swap your stats back over. You can try plotting out the new course of the story and compare it side by side with the original plot. Maybe even write a couple of scenes, see if it gets it out of your system or makes you double down on the new choices.

Keep an awareness of what's changing so that you can tweak the rest of the story to fit, but there's nothing wrong with just carrying on writing until the end. Once you've completed the journey you can nip back to fill it out with road signs and gas stations and such.

 

That's what drafts are for, at least for original fiction.

Got a shiny new idea by chapter six of your story that changes your first six chapters? Cool, keep writing. Don't go back and edit, just pretend those chapters already align with your new idea, and fix them next draft when you loop back to the beginning.

Example: my protagonists had a subplot with this douchebag classmate who is the intended to my female protagonist. This would all come to a head in chapter eighteen, when the douchebag would reveal a huge secret the male protagonist has kept from the reader. But while writing, I couldn't make the scene work. It was dumb. Then I noticed my female protagonist's brother, who has been skulking about the plot the entire story, and who will also be having an argument with the male protagonist around this time. Boom! Instead, the brother would take the douchebag's place in the argument, and the chapter wrote itself. The douchebag's story role was then made redundant and I fired him, never mentioning him again. The next draft I deleted him entirely from earlier chapters.

This works for bigger changes too, but if huge changes keeps happening and throwing everything into chaos, there comes a time to question whether your story was actually ready to be written or needed some time for ideas to settle. To be fair, however, I'm not the type of writer to write when I don't know the ending or where exactly I'm going.

Though be wary, as sometimes new ideas are very tempting as they slide up next to you in the bar, but after a few days of hazy, intimate romance, you realize they won't actually work and then you have to go back and undo any changes you made in the heat of passion.

 

Maybe I'm just a fan of the shiny and new. Seven years ago the first chapter of my story was set in a modern day restaurant and centered around an angry young waitress. It's 2019 and the first chapter of the same story starts on a battlefield between eldritch horrors, Gods, and men.

Small changes and ideas I can incorporate nicely but these huge things that change the entire shape of the story cause me to lose focus completely.

Thanks for your insight though guys. No thread would be complete without @Vira and a sexually charged metaphor.