Unfinished Business

In last Friday's post, Of Milestones and Manuscripts, I mentioned in passing that finishing A Scandalous Liaison was a major accomplishment for me because I had so many quarter- and half-written manuscripts littering my past. In the comments, Jody (aka meankitty aka Typing Slave) asked me to 'fess up as to how many in a blog post.

Well, the truth is, too many for me to be able to tell you how many.

The first piece of fiction I recall writing was a story about a fairy and a jack-o-lantern (hmmm, Erica, this is sounding frighteningly familiar!) back in the second grade. I don't think I want to tell you exactly how many years ago that is, but suffice it to say, it was quite a long time ago and the beginning of what I suspect will be a lifelong obsession. Even in the decade when I wasn't actively writing (from several years after I got married up to last February), I did write in fits and starts--bits and pieces of stories that never quite got up enough steam to get me to commit to them.

Of course, most of what I wrote when I was in junior high and high school (and even college) was craptastically bad. I took a creative writing class in college where the instructor took my stories apart with a gigantic red pen and left them as bleeding carcasses on the floor. At the time, I thought he was harsh and just didn't like my stories because they weren't "literary" enough, but now I realize it was just because they sucked. Oh, they had a few redeeming qualities (I'm pretty certain all the sentences were grammatically correct and accurately spelled), but other than that, I can't think of much that was good about them.

The only thing I ever wrote back then that had any real promise was a bit of Star Wars fan-fic set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I couldn't wait for the next installment, so I had to write my own. And I felt very sorry for Luke after he discovered Leia was his sister, so I gave him a love interest in the form of Emperor Palpatine's daughter. I thought Jedis should get a little up-n-down, too, ya know? Before I finished it, however, ROTJ hit the theaters and writing it became a moot point. Although it still didn't look like Luke was ever gonna get any hot girlie action... (I almost wish I knew where to find that piece now, but I don't. It was written long before computers on a manual typewriter, so it's probably decomposing somewhere in a landfill now along with most of the rest of what I wrote back then.)

Looking back, I suspect that the primary reason I didn't finish anything I started (with the rare exception of a few short stories and one very bad YA novella) was because I knew what I was writing wasn't very good. It was mostly mental masturbation, a way to entertain myself. I never shared anything I wrote with anyone else (at least, not until that disastrous college course that flayed me alive, LOL). And after a certain point, the stories always stopped entertaining me and I moved onto the next one.

So, what changed between then and now? I'm not sure, but I suspect it's a combination of factors. The primary one, though, is that I found a community of writers with interests similar to my own. (That group includes pretty much everyone who reads this blog, of course! So thanks to all of you.)

I do have to give the lion's share of the credit for the fact that A Scandalous Liaison is both finished and not a complete piece of crap to Lacey, though. That's not to say my other critique partners aren't fabulous! They are and have all contributed enormously to everything I've accomplished this last year.

It's just that Lacey was the first to work with me and she pointed out a lot of things in the first version of my manuscript that I didn't know enough to see on my own: passive constructions, telling rather than showing, weak stage direction, POV problems, etc. When I started to apply the simple pointers she gave me, the story got instantly more interesting and entertaining to me, and it seemed infinitely more worth the effort to finish it. (And it's more than a little humbling that she taught me this stuff while being young enough to be my daughter. I wasn't a bad writer when I was her age because I was young; I was just bad!)

So, today's question for ya'll is: What motivates you to keep working on a manuscript until you finish it? And how many unfinished (and possibly never-to-be-finished) books and stories are taking up space on your hard drive or in your file cabinet? Or in landfills?