Reviving Your Unfinished Work

Just wondering, have any of you gone back and finished somthing you let sit for months or years?

I... have the opposite problem facing me right now. I've been fleshing out this one character for months, fine-tuning his backstory, his emotional landscape and his personality. But the problem is, there are a lot of gaping holes in the actual plot that need to be filled.

Then I have this other idea. I've got some semi-solid worldbuilding, a diarrhea-inducing antagonist, and what I'd like to think is a fairly straightforward and sensible plot. So here I am, left to choose which to commit to and which to put on the backburner.

Title fixed.

I've attempted to revive months old projects, but they seldom go anywhere.

Never tried to finish a story that was abandoned years ago, but I do sometimes recycle characters from abandoned projects.

Not counting causal attempts, I tried it twice, once for each of my large projects. One got fifty pages full of loose leaf, another didn't pass the second chapter.

Yes. And considerable work got done, too. But it was never completed anyways.

At some point I might.

I'm trying to stick with my current project until it's done. Considering how long that should take...yeah, starting up other works I never finished after that would definitely count as a revival.

It's probably my best prospect for actually getting a story published, but I want to finish a few other projects first.

I went and started adding an actual outline for one, but the other I haven't even touched yet. I want to finish them in my lifetime though, if possible.

I've done it. But sometimes, I look back at the old work and find it positively cringeworthy, so I rewrite it completely, to the point where it has nothing in common with the original, except for the names. It's fun to look at all the drafts and wonder how I made something almost halfway decent out of utter dreck—then wonder about what I'll think of this new work a few months later (I'll probably cringe at it and rewrite it again).

I had a work that made years ago but never finished although it was more of a short story if anything.

How in the name of FUCK did I not post that? Seriously.

The novel I've been investing the bulk of my attention on these days is a ground-up rewrite of an uncompleted genre-shift redo of a story I'd laid out the blueprints for in 2006. Over time I've gone from a melodrama with noirish undercurrents to a vulgar, over-the-top farce.

I hardly ever revive unfinished work. I need to be really inspired to do so. But sometimes on a whim, I try to finish a work.