Writers always have too many ideas for stories. One of the most common complaints I hear among my writer friends is that they have more ideas than they have time to write them.

Me, I’m like a butterfly. I flit from flower (idea) to flower (idea) and often don’t end up getting anything accomplished. Things will grab me. It might be a movie (I’m looking at you, Endgame!) or a book, or something someone says to me, or a dream. And I get enthusiastic about telling that story, and I move away from the one I was most currently working on.

Consequently, I have many unfinished stories in various stages of completion. I have five published works, plus a couple of collections of short stories, but my unfinished works greatly outnumber the finished ones.

When they announced The Force Awakens, I had the thought that space opera was going to be a big thing, so I started a novel about a space junker who comes across a small derelict starship, but the ship isn’t exactly empty, and to the main character, there’s a whole lot of deja vu happening.

Here we are, years later, as the third of this Star Wars trilogy is being released soon, and I still haven’t finished it. I started over once because I liked the story I was telling but I didn’t like the way I was telling it. Still, there it sits. I work on it from time to time, especially after I read some space opera by someone like Chris Fox or Lindsey Buroker or Val St. Crowe. And I do plan on finishing it. I think it might be pretty cool when I finally do so. But when that will happen, I don’t know.

There’s always a post-apocalyptic novel out there to attract my attention (squirrel!!) and most recently, I’ve read novels by Steven M. Moore (The Last Humans), M.P. McDonald (her Infection series), and John L. Monk (Hell’s Children). I started writing one back in the nineties, called Inherit The Earth, and Monk’s stories especially inspired me to get back on that one. I’ve written over 60K words, and I don’t know how much more I have to go. I just know that eventually I have to end it. Then edit it and probably lose about a quarter of it. We’ll see.

I also was inspired years ago by Hugh Howey’s Wool series, and I started this novel which originally was set in his universe. But after a short email exchange with Hugh, I realized that it wouldn’t work with his concepts. Instead of stopping, I changed what I needed to change and plowed ahead. It stands at something close to 100K words, but still doesn’t have an end in sight.

Years ago I wrote a trilogy of vampire detective stories called The Striker Files. At some point, I thought it would be fun to continue that story. Seems like there’d be ramifications from the events at the end of the third story. So I settled in to write another story in that universe. It ended up being novel length, right around 60K words give or take, and while it answered the questions posed by the first three short stories, it brought up even more questions. That finished work is untitled and I’m still editing it. But I am writing another novel in that series, and currently I think it stands at about 16K words, give or take.

I also used to be part of a forum on Delphi Internet Services called the Horror Discussion Group. We developed a shared world called Addison Falls, and I wrote a story called The Ghost Train which can be found in my collection Die 6 (see it there on the right? Scroll down if you don’t see it by now). At some point I decided to start writing a novel in that world. I don’t have a title, but I work on it every so often. It stands at about 25K I think, and I don’t know when it will be done.

I also read a book by Bryan Smith called Last Day or something like that, and it inspired me to write a similar story about the moon coming toward the Earth. It’s horror, not science fiction, so I don’t have to be scientifically accurate. After all, it has a werewolf as one of its main villains. It stands at around 20K. I am not sure it will end up as a novel; it may only make it to novella length.

I’ve also written one MG/YA novel (about 53K words) with my son that is complete, about a pair of siblings searching for their missing father with the help of his friend and colleague. It’s got odd villains (courtesy of my son), an interesting setting (mostly the American southwest) and of course, treasure. It will be published some day. But drawing from the inspiration of writing that and reading a lot of their stuff (Rick Riordan’s work in particular, like the Percy Jackson novels and The Thirty Nine Clues), I started another about young people finding themselves inside of a modern day King Arthur story, complete with Morgan Le Fay and whatever else I can dream up. I’m probably only 10K into it, but again, I hope it will some day be published.

You get the idea. There are others. I have a couple of odd urban fantasies cooking, a weird kidnapping/thriller set in Thailand (a mostly imaginary Thailand, since I’ve never been there), a couple of thrillers (one horror, one not) set in colleges, and a psychological Coben-esque thriller set in my home town. Some have quite a lot written, some not so much. But the ideas, they keep coming.

Someday I’ll have time to write them all.

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I could have titled this post “What stops me from reading,” but I haven’t found too many things where I just set something aside and say “the heck with that one.”  Which is to say that I finish most of what I start.  As a wannabe-writer, I read articles and blogs when they deal with craft, and a common theme seems to be that we need to keep our foot on the pedal throughout our works of genre fiction.  Is that true?  I’ve been thinking about it after reading Joe Hill’s NOS4A2.  Because as I read that book, there were a few times early on where I almost set it aside and moved onto something else.

Why?  Well, if you read my review on Goodreads of the book, you’d see that I felt there were times the author, like his father Stephen King, bogged himself down in narrative details that were designed to add richness to the setting, to the character, to the plot.  But unlike his father, every instance of this in Hill’s novel did NOT work.  They just pulled away from the main thrust of the story.  I can’t get specific on it, because 1.) I don’t have the book with me and 2.) I didn’t take any notes.  I just knew that I was considering putting the book down without finishing.  (I’ve had that feeling in Hill’s father’s works as well, notably recently with UNDER THE DOME.)

So I started thinking about what I, as a reader (a former VORACIOUS reader who did about ten books a month, currently a less voracious type who maybe does three or four books a month), look for as I read.  What keeps me reading?  I already stated that one thing that MIGHT stop me from reading is having too much extraneous detail added into the narrative.  Another might be an inconsistent plotline.

So far, I haven’t thrown anything across the room for grammatical/typographical errors.  (Good thing, too, because I’m reading so much on my Kindle and it might break if I threw it.)  So I think I can safely rule them out as what makes me stop reading.  And the converse, that it is excellent grammar and absolutely clean, perfect typing that would KEEP me reading, is also out.  I believe that these things appear or disappear based on the reader’s (my) involvement in the story.  If a story has really pulled me in, I tend to skip over the grammatical/typographical errors.  Now, I admit that I haven’t really found a single work that is LOADED with the things (apparently contrary to Amazon’s reviews, which seem to find typos everywhere they look in a lot of indie fiction…are those people who are actually reading, or are they people from big publishing houses and bookstores and such who have an axe to grind against indie writers?).  Most every book has a few.  Some more than others.  No pattern as to whether it’s more prevalent in trad-published fiction or in self-published fiction.  Most pass by my eyes while registering in a very superficial way with my brain.  (Like, “oh, they meant ‘wind’ and not ‘mind.’  Got it.)

Yet, I can definitely notice differences in what keeps me reading.  What calls to me when I put it down, making me want to get back to it as soon as possible.  What I can leave for days or weeks at a time and come back to it, not feeling much urgency.  And mostly, I feel it comes down to plot.

If an author gives me a compelling plot, I’ll keep reading.  If I have to know what happens next, I will think about the story until I can get back to it.  Story by itself isn’t enough.  I think that there are stories in everything.  Plot is what makes them compelling.  The difference between these two might be summed up by this quote:

A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.

A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

(The quote is from Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft 5th ed. Longman, 2000, by Janet Burroway, and paraphrases E.M. Forster.)

The best history gives us both story and plot.  The most boring history simply gives us the story of what happened.  So I can fully agree with this quote.  I forgive a lot when a plot sucks me in and makes me want to read until I can’t keep my eyes open or I’m finished, whichever comes first.

But what about characters?  What if you have a great plot, but you’ve put the most boring characters in it that you can imagine?  Is it still compelling?

I would suggest that you need both.  Plot is first, but the characters cannot be cardboard cutouts.  This is not to say that everyone needs to be a superhero, or a CIA spy, or something like that.  In fact, in my opinion, there is something compelling about reading a character who is ordinary.  Someone about whom you as a reader might say, “I know people like this guy or girl.” That’s what works for me.

Great characters with a less-than-compelling plot will be less readable, for me, than a great plot with okay characters.  You have to care about the characters, but you also have to be interested in the situation they find themselves in.

The third important element for me is setting.  I’ve often felt that setting can almost act as another character in a novel.  Stephen King does that as good as anyone.  As I read his early novel SALEM’S LOT, I came to know the community of Jerusalem’s Lot as well as I knew Ben Mears or Barlow or any of the other characters in the book.  It’s the same with other King novels as well.  Castle Rock and Derry became almost-characters in King’s fiction, staple settings that worked for multiple stories, and their quirks and their denizens were almost as important as the actual characters.

That said, setting as an element of fiction falls to third in importance.  While masterful description of setting is a huge asset to a story, a generic setting doesn’t kill said story IF the characters and the plot are there.

When I review books, I tend to try to look at them in this manner.  I try to mention all three of these elements in the review, and discuss whether they were great, good or average.  (If they’re bad, I usually don’t bother reviewing the book.  I usually don’t like to say anything bad about a book.  The exception is those authors, like King, Koontz, Coben, etc etc, who have a track record, and whose works I find myself comparing to other works by themselves and not so much to other works by other authors.  Often, I think that a second tier King or Coben novel is better than some novels which I’ve given high marks to, but how can I rate UNDER THE DOME or THE WOODS the same as the best novels by those authors?)

So in summary, for me, it’s:

1.   PLOT
2.   CHARACTERS
3.   SETTING

So why can’t I seem to finish DROOD by Dan Simmons, whose works I normally love?  I don’t think it’s the characters or the setting, so it must be the plot.  Unless the pacing is dragging it down so far for me that I can’t seem to bring myself to resume reading it…  Length can be daunting, and if you don’t see an end in sight, it can be hard to pick up something that’s really dragging for you.  The aforementioned books by King and Hill both have that issue with length.

But maybe that’s a discussion for a different day, and a different post.

Also, there is the promise that a book makes as I read it.  If it doesn’t live up to that promise; if it ends up being something other than what I believe it is based on the promise it makes with its descriptions, its cover, its early chapters, even its characters and setting…again, maybe that is a different post.  And is about as close as I can get to craft, since I’m a far more accomplished reader than I am a writer (whether I’m a critical enough reader is debatable, but it is what it is…)

Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t done so, go buy one of my books and see if I live up to the things I talk about in this post.  🙂

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