Living the Fictional Dream

I am cursed with stories that have good beginnings but never go anywhere. This happens to me all the time. I will get an idea for a character, a background scenario, a setting, or a combination thereof, and I’ll sit down to write. The first scene will come out beautifully — the situation seems interesting, the characters intriguing, hints of dire things to come — but the middle and end turn out flat. The plot doesn’t hold up, and the whole thing crashes and burns.

Sometimes, I can go back and salvage the ending with a lot of work. And sometimes, my muse takes a holiday and nothing ever comes of it.

One of my biggest failings, which falls into this larger issue of good beginnings and bad endings, is that many times my characters are reactive instead of proactive. They may have a larger goal, but the things that happen to them aren’t necessarily about that goal — at least not on a personal level. Instead, stuff happens to them that isn’t of their own choosing, and they react to it.

Once I wrote a story about a girl who met a sea dragon. She had a companion who was a sand wolf. I really liked these three characters. There was a whole adventure where they tried to sail to an island, and the sea dragon saved them from a sea monster. It was very exciting. But, in the end, there wasn’t really a theme to the piece. Stuff happened, people reacted, and then the story was over. I’ve fiddled with that story several times since, but I never can figure out what the main character’s motivation is, what it is she has to do.

I’ve been trying to work on the reactive/proactive thing. I think I’ve gotten better just because now I realize that tendency in my writing and work to eliminate it, but sometimes my characters fall back into their old reactive ways.

I’ve finally felt like writing again now that NaNo and that big work project are over. I’ve had a few ideas glimmering in the back of my mind, but they are more concepts than plots, and no good plots have come along for the ride.

This morning, I pulled out a story that I wrote for my writing group’s “Story Every Day” contest last summer. My goal had been to write something sci-fi that I could submit to the “Return to Luna” anthology, but this story fell into that same trap — the beginning was good, the characters interesting, but the plot fell apart at the end. It was cliched and somewhat trite.

Now I’m working on this story again, and the beginning has polished up really nicely. I just have to get some work done on the actual plot. I have to figure out what bad thing my protagonist did or will do and how it will affect him and the woman who’s helping him out. Seems like a tall order, but it’s been fun to get back into a story again (one that’s not in the ‘verse of my NaNo novel!).

So, what about you writer’s out there? Do you ever have this problem? Do you keep fiddling and fiddling with that great beginning until it becomes something marketable, or do you toss it down and look for the next good idea, which will hopefully have a better plot. What do you think about making characters proactive?

In other news, I got my copy of the EDF anthology in the mail last night. The hardback edition is really gorgeous!