How many times have you scrapped a story?

[Van]

I believe this is the fifth time I scrapped my concept for MikoMooMaa. It's like no matter what I do I can't find myself happy with what I create. Each time I get close to finish the first story arc but the I realize holes and I just can't bring myself to finish it.

Oh well, Oopsie daisy. I'll have to simply try again~

Anyhow, has anyone else scrapped a story multiple times over and over due to lack of experience and honestly being unsure of where to take your story after realizing clear issues?

[Mar_Sadeh]

I can't recall many times I have explicitly gone "This story is bad, tossing it," and explicitly scrapped a story in the manner you describe. However, the number of stories I started and didn't finish because I didn't like where they were going, got stuck, or otherwise realized some great flaw? Countless. From my early days writing bad fanfiction to high school and the story about the demon lady and the kingdom to now, stories and ideas for them have come and gone.

I would say it's less that the stories were eliminated entirely per se, and more they morphed. My current protagonist in the novel I am working on (sloooooowly, sadly - I hope to carve out enough time to get back to it soon) is in some sense a new character entirely from any previous, but in another sense, is she not an evolution of my previous character Kathryn from years ago? Who herself was morphed from a different character years before that, who before that was someone else, who before that was... And so on. They say that all characters you write are an expression of oneself, and I would say this is true enough - the stories I've scrapped and the characters thrown away have never really vanished. They've collected, merged, formed in the back of my mind, metamorphosed into someone new, just as I have grown, changed, and matured alongside them.

At some point though, you will have to simply "get on with it", for lack of a better term. This is what drafting is for. Having plotholes in your first arc is okay, especially if you change your mind on the ending or decide to add/remove a new character or some such, if you go back and fix them on a second draft of your story. Almost nothing you will read in a commercially available novel has gone through just a single draft, and this is why.

[godfrey_narcisso]

I've scrapped mine 4x since 2017. Serious story problems aside, one of the biggest reasons that made me drop it repeatedly is the art. Solo Leveling was slowly growing in popularity during that time when I began working on my webtoon and it became my barometer on what's acceptable to release. It made me face the harsh and painful truth about how bad my art was. Hell, I still remember how I wouldn't touch my stuff for days whenever I'd finish reading SL's new episodes. It's so demoralizing.

The good thing though is it eventually taught me to be honest with myself on where I was lacking and what I should improve on. I still wouldn't rank my current art even close to the likes of SL or Omniscient Reader because it still look amateur compared to them. But at least at my current level, I don't feel THAT insecure now when I compare it side by side (well, barring some of their peak longform panels that I wouldn't dare share the same screen as my work in order to protect my crumbling self-confidence).

But still, what I would give to reach that peak... maybe I should scrap it again lol.

[faisalhussein394]

When I was 15, I create this comic called blood wars. Very Edgy, I know. Just looking back at it made me feel cringe, it's too much focus on conflict, the characters are one-dimensional and the MC has no goal in mind nor have I done a backstory about him. So that was scrapped.

When I was close to finishing High school, I started a new comic called the last Immortal, and it seems to have a much better start than the last comic I make but it didn't get much attention maybe because I only update it on Deviant art and just by looking back at it, I feel like I just made the Main Character a goddamn Gary Stu! So I scrapped it without hesitation.

When I am in college, I started doing a fan-art comic called Crossover which is about heroes from different popular content such as Marvel, DC, Shonen Jump coming together and working as a team. it's clear that this is about getting attention and as much as I like getting so many views, likes, and subscribes on Deviant art, it is not the comic I want to continue, so I left my account entirely. Never coming back. So that's strike three. (I think you can still find it on deviant art.)

After I am done with college and now working, I am searching for a website where you can publish your comic and I find some; Comic fury, Smack Jeeves, Webtoon, and Tapas. This is where my current comic called "Mukhtar" takes place. I started using all of them at once and see how it goes and the winner goes to TAPAS!

I'm not getting anything from Comic fury, nor Smackjeeves.

I did get some feedback on Webtoon but the viewers are more focused on romance, since of life, and lgbtq+ Even on comics that have none of these genres (possibly to annoy the authors).

As for Tapas, I'm having a good time and I am not leaving it any time soon. Mukhtar is now my current comic and I will continue updating it Tapas.

Possibly this year, I will be making another comic on Tapas but it is more focused on exposition and lore and it relates to the universe of Mukhtar. It's called "The rise and fall of Abbasia". A sci-fi comic.

I guess the fourth time must be a lucky charm.

[Lensing]

Hundreds of times?
The more honest I am to myself the more likely it is to stick to a story, but the risk of people hating it is also bigger
but that´s a risk I have to take as a creator

[DokiDokiTsuna]

One story that comes to mind is on something like its 20th rewrite...although the number is probably higher than that, especially considering the iterations I did in my head when I was a kid. ^^

It's just so, so lore-heavy...it doesn't have to be, but the lore and the mechanics of the story are my favorite parts; if I don't include them somehow there's really no point in writing it. ^^; So I struggle on, with the greatest writing challenge of my life...

I think I'm getting closer to a solution, though. My latest iteration of the story is tailored to the writing strategy I've developed over the years: finding a message you want to send with each main character, and shaping the plot accordingly.
I think one of the biggest problems across rewrites is that its 2 MC's have so far felt kinda...tacked on to the plot, instead of focused on as they should be. They get a lot of 'screentime', yes, but they don't have their own journey...they just solve whatever problems are placed in front of them.
And this is a story where introspection is a big, BIG deal...I've been giving more attention to the antagonists and side characters' character development than theirs, and that ain't right.

So with this rewrite, I want to try to figure out what the MC's need and actually let them grow and change so they can fill those needs, instead of just letting them be sad and then kill badguys until they stop being sad. ^^; So far, this has meant cutting out a LOT of side characters and their content...which is a little upsetting, but I think it's a good thing to leave your comfort zone a little more with each rewrite. It lets you know you're actually making big changes and different decisions...which is the whole point.

[powerplantanimations]

11 friggin' times. One of the biggest reasons why I restarted it for the ninth time was because of the Tapas format. I hadn't really released a comic back then, so I assumed I was able to get away with traditional. Turns out people preferred this format I was putting out with my stick figure comic.

The tenth time was when I realized my story would be WAY better if I just killed the main character and replaced him with someone else.

The eleventh time is when I was trying to find a new hook to deliver my message, and I managed to come up with an interesting concept.

Hopefully people will like it when it comes out. I wouldn't be doing this unless there's something I've been meaning to get out there. As for the main character, he just appeared in my webcomic that's out now. Which is ANOTHER reason why I had to rewrite his story. Because I thought to myself "Huh... if I connect these two stories together, it would make my message even more compelling".

That Stick Figure Isekai | Tapas

[TheLemmaLlama]

I don't think I've scrapped the same story over and over again, but I can make a list of all the stories I've scrapped. In fact, I'm just gonna do it:

• Carefree (and then a reboot which I also scrapped) - I realised I had no direction; I had an ending, but no theme/message and thus nothing to inform how I was going to get from start to finish
• The Curtains Were Blue - This one had more direction but I had another project I cared more about that explored the same themes, so dropped it because of redundancy
• Group Theory - Again, felt like the theme here is better merged into another work
• Silly Research Society - If I had to describe my current comic as a reboot of something, it would probably be this.
• Sponsor Spirits, which later became Mindscapes, then became Off the Hamster Wheel which is an in-universe comic of one of my characters in my current comic
• A Rhapsody of Black and White, which then became A Stranger's Dream, which then became scrapped. Redundant themes.
• The Scum Among Us - a gameshow dealio to replace Rhapsody when it became Stranger's Dream and lost the gameshow setting
• Tell, Don't Show
• Sigma Quest - I guess it was roughly speaking a precursor to Silly Research Society and After the World Was Saved (the latter being something I'm planning for the future and thus not a scrapped story)

Maybe I should make a family tree for my projects sometime XD

[AmandaJ-art]

I have scrapped many stories. I've been posting comics online since I was 12, so there is a lot.

I made random comics with no plot really. I kept getting bored and moving on to the next thing. I made FNAF, Pokemon, something similar to Warrior cats, Hetalia.

After these I made stories with actual plot. I made a story based off of my great grandma's childhood. I added a lot of Latvian folclor in to it. I scrapped it as I just didn't like how I wrote it. Felt like there was just a lot of nothing.

I started writting the story about my great grandma's childhood again. This time I was making it in to a children's book. I also felt like I didn't like it as much and felt like my art needed to be imporved more and so it was scrapped.

I will probably attempt the story again when my great grandmother passes away.

I made a Hetaoni comic that I finished one page of. (It's a long RPG maker game that I just would have no patience to finish)

[system]

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