Rebooting Your WIP

Has this ever happened to you?

You're not making much progress on a story. It's not so much writer's block as writer's constipation. Then revelation strikes! Your protagonist is actually someone else! O noes!

By that I mean your concept of the character is flawed in some fundamental way. Suppose wizards get a set of powers based on their Zodiac sign. Your heroine has been a Sagittarius all along, but now you know she's really a Capricorn. Everything about her has to be re-examined, some of it reworked, some of it trashed.

So what next? Do you drop the idea? Do you start over? Do you let the whole thing simmer for a while?

Had similar notions. Mostly with worlds that, on reflection, really aren't as interesting as I thought they were. Usually they get broken down for parts, by which I mean random elements of them end up contaminating all my other worlds.

What is WIP?

Work In Progress

I've rebooted entire story arcs, and eventually, characterization altogether. So yeah, know that feel.

I reboot it.

Oh. I have one story I wrote in 9th grade that was absolutely horrible.

But the core concepts and interactions are solid.

I want to one day completely revamp it, but keep what I initially liked about it.

I've done that with some of my stuff, but most of it — because I spend a lot of time thinking, planning, daydreaming, etc. before I actually start writing — is as perfect as it's gonna get by the time I actually fire up the word processor, and all I have to do is figure out how to describe it.

Yes. Yes I have.

For four years.

Endlessly. ;_;

I'm hoping this is the last time I'd do this...so I can work on the second book. ><

edited 14th Dec '11 10:28:05 AM by Masterofchaos

Would taking an anime girl who's actually the virtual manifestation of a computer program and drastically overwriting her personality in-universe to "upgrade" her count as rebooting?

edited 14th Dec '11 1:31:18 PM by Dragonzordasaurus

Rebooting is a routine thing in my writing process. I do it all the time.

No.

I have one WIP I've rather valiantly attempted to save from total failure for awhile now, but the more I chop apart and revamp (up to and including an entire medium shift), the more it strikes me as both overly-ambitious and just not particularly good (and considering that I came up with it in the 7th Grade, this is unsurprising).

Ah well. Plenty of new, (comparatively) better things to work on.

Then, no, I've never done this before.

Back before June 2011 or so, I had many restarts and a handful of reboots for projects that managed to go far.

However, Manifestation Files is yet to suffer major major changes. Yes, I changed the direction of the entire second part, but the basic framework had stayed the same.

I don't so much reboot as reconsider, often expanding upon what I'd initially intended to be an incidental trait or a throwaway remark. This means I often go back and add more foreshadowing for something, but I usually don't need to change things radically.