What to do when you've outgrown your own story

@hisstidine Hisstidine
Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:16:28 +0000

@hisstidine wrote:

It can be hard to keep going with a story that you came up with in a different time of your life. My future projects are actually ones where I came up with the characters and plot when I was a teenager, and now I'm almost 30. So unsurprisingly those characters and stories have changed a LOT. But there's an upside to taking so long to actually get started, and it's that I've been able to jettison a lot of my bad ideas and rework the stories into something I like.

I decided to take some of the plot points that now seem like my characters having really terrible ideas and reframe them into being about characters in their early 20s learning from their mistakes.

I think some degree of boredom with your story is inevitable, but sometimes it's best to cut your losses and move on. Personally, I like the idea of salvaging as much as you can from old stories. Sometimes if you just take all the things you like and put them together, it can give you an idea of how to a) make your story into one you want to keep writing or b) write a whole new story.