The unformed idea

The majority of my work languishes on my hard drive. I’ll never delete it but if I’m honest with myself, I’ll probably never complete it either. A great deal of it is unworthy of completion. Ridiculously contrived premises based on books or movies or just my own young frustrations.

My first and only screenplay (written and submitted to a critique sight when I was nineteen or twenty) got this comment: Now that the writer has gotten that out of her system, she could go on to write something really good.

I think this applies to alot of my old work.

Alot but certainly not all of it.

There are beautifully complex characters that will never live out their stories.

There are massive fantasy worlds that wait to be populated.

Ghosts who remain in shadows and wars that are forever impending.

The problem isn’t that the idea was juvenile. It’s that it is unformed. Whatever spark that compelled me to set it to text, never spread to the kindling. A plot never formed. A conflict never rose up. An ending never presented itself.

It’s disappointing, to say the least, when I go back and revisit these files and find they still have all the potential they had at the beginning, and I still have no idea where to take them.

One such unformed idea is bouncing around my head right now. I know I should be preparing for edits on “Summer’s Circle” but it is so damned good.

I’m resisting the urge to start it though. Experience taught me that if I don’t have the bare bones mapped out in my head when I put those first lines into word, the chances are I will never have them.

So I am researching. I am risking losing the inspiration and passion for the project until I know just what the novel is going to look like.

I know now that I am capable of fleshing it out and getting it done. Although I just finished a feverish nighttime schedule of writing, I long to start it up all over again.

But I am waiting, urging the idea along, trying to get it to present itself to me in it’s entirety. Otherwise, it could be doomed.

Help me out! Can you finish a manuscript that starts on an incomplete idea? What do you do to make it whole?