Workshop: Poison Carrots: Finishing Works in Progress
[I apologize in advance for probably not being able to respond to comments on this essay in as timely a fashion as I'd like. I'm in Nagasaki sight-seeing and once again, for the second time in a row, have found that the online booking agency totally lied about this hotel having Internet access! It's a lovely hotel, very pretty and comfortable, and I'm seeing shapes in the wallpaper because I have no Internet access. To the Internet café to post this, ho!]
Today we're looking at the question of how to finish a series in a reasonably satisfactory manner and time frame. I note as a self-introduction that I've finished a couple of series--precisely two, as a matter of fact. This isn't particularly an overwhelming record, but I do have a certain dogged stubbornness in writing that might recommend me somewhat on the topic. I'm far from an expert on it, however, and it's a very idiosyncratic issue. All I'm doing here is taking a look at how I and some other people I know manage to get through a WIP and to the other side.
But before we start looking at that in depth, it might be good to start by asking: are you sure you want to finish that series? There's a reason soap operas are a popular genre, and it has little to do with the content and much to do with the form--a series that continues indefinitely can actually be a lot of fun. It can ramble and explore and take its own sweet time, becoming something very different than when it started. So don't be too quick to assume you should finish a series.
Bonsai Bunnies
However, once you decide you do actually want a series with a discrete beginning and end, it's important to find some way to limit your imagination a bit. As writers, we often worry about how to prompt our imagination, but in my experience an over-active imagination can be a real hindrance to finishing a series as well. We see so many things we want to explore and can't resist working them in, but the result can be a shapeless series that doesn't go anywhere. As in writing a poem--a sonnet or a haiku or whatever--imposing limits gives a series power and shape. In essay-writing we're often given the advice to start small, then expand our ideas in the middle of an essay, then focus back on the thesis at the conclusion. Well, the same advice goes for writing a series--if you just keep branching off and expanding infinitely, you'll never finish. Eventually (if you want to have a focused series, and again, that's not the only choice you have) you have to decide what themes and characters were the important ones and return to them. It's the difference between a wildly flourishing plant with offshoots and buds everywhere and a bonsai tree--if you want to have a controlled shape, you have to prune. You lose vigor and reach, but you gain (with luck) focus and intensity.
1. Goal-Limited Series. These series have an end state in mind and the author knows in advance that the focus of the series needs to be on that end state--and that once it's reached, the series stops. Mind you, that's not to say you can't pick up again in the same universe after the series ends--God forbid! The end of a series as I see it is just a pretty tying-off point before you start unreeling the next set of stories. With these kinds of series the key lies in knowing what the focus on your story is and sticking with it. Syncopation is Two-Face's story. If I wanted to start exploring Clark's struggles to remain human, his terror of being abandoned by Bruce, his relationship with Jase (all of which I do)--I either put them in side stories or promised myself I'd give myself a whole arc about them later. I personally believe the latter is a better choice because it helps you get around a common terror that keeps people from ending series--the terror that when the series is done, you'll be out of ideas and done writing. Saving themes to work on in more depth later, rather than treating them glancingly in a series that's focused on something else, is like a promise to yourself that you're not going to run out of ideas. Put in hints and reminders to yourself (Jason appears briefly in Syncopation just to remind me that he's still dealing with his half-remembered murder and crippling adoration of Superman, but I don't dwell on it). Hints like that are for your own pleasure, though if they work out well people will note them as foreshadowing later.
Goal-limited series are very good if you have a definite story you want to tell, or a very specific character arc you want to follow. A few other good goal-limited series I've read (there are many) are
merfilly's S/B series Control, in which she knew the focus of the stories would be the power struggle between the two men and their resolution of that struggle (she didn't know exactly what it would be at the beginning, but that didn't matter);
damo_in_japan' s An Odious Riddle, which has a clear end goal and each story is another step toward that goal; and
htbthomas's Déjà Vu, which walks Clark and Lois through her recovering her memories after Superman Returns and reconciling the two of them. They're lean, tight series--and would be if the authors had taken five or fifty-five stories to write them, because they keep their eyes on the prize, so to speak.
2. Time-Limited Series. This is a series where you set some arbitrary time limit on the proceedings, choose a nebulous end state you want to get to, and within those time constraints you let things develop kind of organically. Both Earth & Sky and 36 Views of Mt. Fuji are time-limited series. E&S is one story a month in the canon world over the length of one year (with intervening stories set in the AU). 36 Views of Mt. Fuji is 4 short arcs of nine stories each, covering one year.
tmelange's Fourteen Days in (a Fool's) Paradise is fourteen chapters, one per day (it also has a strict goal-limitation as well, which is one of the reasons it's such a nice, tight series). Time-limited series are both fun and scary for me, because I have a beginning and an end (a very vague one), but I'm never sure what the middle will be. I wait to see what themes crop up and where they go. Time-limited series are especially interesting to me because I'm very open to feedback in how they develop. In Syncopation, for example, I knew what I wanted to do and there wasn't much room for flexibility. But with E&S and Fuji, I read the comments, see how people are responding, what themes they seem to be enjoying, and work those reactions into my eventual end goal (trying not to lose sight of the goal or my muses, of course). But for example, when many people responded to the second chapter of Fuji with (understandable) fury that Clark could learn Japanese so fast, I had the opening to say, "But wait, here's what he can't pick up with speed-reading," and that became a whole exploration of Clark's awkwardness and their mutual misperceptions of each other. An OC started off as a total throw-away character and I slowly began to realize he was a lot more important than I first thought. That's a real rush, playing it by ear and developing it as it goes. The difficulty is in keeping it focused, and that's where the time limitation is useful--I know I have only so many stories to finish in, so I'd better figure out where I'm going.
There are other kinds of limitations you can use, and I've seen some employed very well. Some series take a "faceted" approach, exploring different angles of a theme.
merfilly's "Fantasies Become..." series used the senses as a starting point--each drabble explored a different detail of Superman that one could fixate on. Each drabble slowly builds on each other, adding layers. Challenges and prompts are basically a form of limiting a series of stories.
pervyficgirl is working on "30 deathfics" with Dick Grayson;
cero_ate is doing "100 Moods" (also focused on Dick). Challenges are a whole different kind of series where the plots are usually only loosely connected, if at all; the exploration of the theme is the key. All you have to do is, uh...just write the 30 or 100 or whatever stories!
Yeah, how do you do that?
Pragmatics: How to Crush Your Imagination
I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Sort of. But I mean it when I say that a big part of getting WIPs done is dogged, stubborn refusal to be distracted by other pretty, shiny ideas. When I asked DaMo what advice he'd give someone on how to finish WIPs, he said, "Get a Master's or a PhD." When I expressed puzzlement, he explained, "For our doctoral dissertations, the only things we had to write were those theses. And if we didn't write them, we would never finish graduate school. Period. You learn how to focus and ignore the fact that maybe you don't feel like writing X at the moment--if you want to get done you will damn well write."
He's got a point, but if you don't feel like going to graduate school just to practice stubbornness, you'll have to find other ways to focus and avoid getting distracted by pretty side projects. Here are a few of the tricks I use to keep my imagination from wandering off with me--I'd love to hear more of yours.
One is to keep a list of bunny ideas. I really truly have a Google Document titled "Bunny List." When I get an idea I really want to write, it goes on that list, along with each series I'm working on.
Then I limit myself to working on only two stories at a time. I can think about any story that I want, but I am absolutely forbidden to start outlining or typing them until I finish one of the two projects I'm working on. If I want to write that Lana/Clark bondage story (and oh, I do), I'm just going to have to finish something else first.
Usually the two projects are a series/arc and a stand-alone short story. I keep working on the series and use the stand-alone stories to work on any themes or styles I want to write that aren't being expressed in the series. 36 Views of Mt. Fuji has been smut-free and will remain so for at least about 10-14 more stories, so when I feel the desire to write smut I express it in the second (side) project.
I try to have clear stopping points in each series--mini-arcs like each season in 36 Views. That gives me a chance to stop and say, "Okay, I'm done with Winter. Do I want to charge on to Spring or do I want to take a break and write an arc in Music of the Spheres?" I take stock, decide what I want to do based on my mood and what I think people might like, and switch series or not. Yes, this means some series languish for a while. But I prefer to get through one arc fairly steadily rather than four or five in a scattershot way. That's very much a personal preference thing though, I think.
The real difficulty here is keeping those bunnies locked down. As
htbthomas said in the last open thread, letting bunnies sit for a while is good...if your interest in them languishes, they weren't worth the energy to begin with. And sometimes there's an odd and unique pleasure in putting off a story a long time. I've had a smutty little bunny about Batman finding a way to synthesize large amounts of Kryptonian cloth for about eight months now. When stuck on a bus or a long line, I pull it out and think about it for a while, even though I know I'm probably not going to get to it for a long time still.
"You've got that smut-writing smile on your face," says DaMo.
"I do?" I say innocently.
Not being allowed to write about it gives me a chance to really let it run around freely for a while, which is fun for me and, I think, good for the bunny. I'm less likely to start working on a series that looks cool but loses interest for me this way.
We've been focusing on wrapping up series, but what about when you can't seem to finish up a story?
Short Story WIPs and the Oral Tradition (or, Jen gets out her soapbox a bit)
Taking a look at difficulties with finishing stories themselves, rather than wrapping up series of stories, it seems to me that there are issues and tendencies that keep people from finishing and posting them. One is perfectionism. You want the story to be flawless before you post it, so you go back over and over and over it, polishing and tightening and perfecting. Which is great, until it starts reaching the point that you can't seem to actually finish it--there's always something that needs tweaking, something that could be improved. Eventually you're not changing anything anymore, but it doesn't seem good enough to put up, either.
Perfectionism, in my opinion, is a crippling problem in fandom. People don't become better writers in a vacuum, we become better writers through the process of writing, and that process includes putting it out in public and dealing with reaction. Writing, especially fan fiction, is essentially ephemeral. None of us (okay, very few of us) are writing the Great American Novel or a work of great literature; we're writing stories about people in spandex fighting and falling in love. A big part of the reason I don't have many WIPs is that I honestly don't see most of my work as of enduring quality. Maybe it's an oral mindset rather than a literary one: I see my fan fiction as the equivalent of a stand-up routine or a story told around a campfire--it's told and then it's done and people move on to another story. That ephemeral quality can be a major benefit to the community, because it means that the same tropes and ideas are told over and over again with small changes and to inexhaustible pleasure for the audience.
I don't mean here that fan fiction is not at times great art! But it's not great literature. It's an endless cycle of stories that ring subtle and infinite changes on familiar lines to an enthralled audience, rather than massive, original work that marks the author as a Great Writer. It's Homer rather than Hemingway, the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose instead of The Great Gatsby. No Greek audience ever said, "Oh Zeus, he's going to tell that story about the wooden horse again!" as their bard stood up to re-tell the Iliad; I've never seen a comment on LJ that says, "Not another sex pollen story!" (perhaps everyone is just too polite...) Oral styles only thrive if the "author" gets the tale told and moves on to the next iteration. An oral storyteller can't wait until the story is "perfect" to tell it; timeliness is more important than timelessness. Get it out there and write another version of it if you're not happy with how it turned out! Again, although we all worry about it, we rarely run out of ideas in fandom.
Confessions of a Bunny-Stomper
This essay could have been called something like "Care and Feeding (and Brutal Disciplining) of Plot Bunnies." Honestly, I think a lot of writers might find my approach to bunnies rather joyless and depersonalized--there are times I approach a story and I don't really feel like writing the next scene, and I write it anyway, because I have to finish this story to move on to something else. I think (I hope) that usually my love for the larger story and the characters is enough to get me through those times and keep my writing joyous--and very often I find myself loving the passage as I'm writing it-- but I have to admit it might not be an approach that works for everyone. I'd love to hear how you approach the issue of achieving closure in your work! Please share!