Once, almost a year ago, I decided that I wanted to write a frightening mystery story: a diversion from my usual trend of writing adventure tales and heroic stories. This book would be called the Gates of Terror, and I was extremely excited to write it in the beginning. At that time I had only written one other book, A New Dimension, and had run into a near writers-block situation as I was trying to write a second book. I was planning on this second book to be the sequel to the first one, A New Dimension, so it would include the same characters and would continue on from the story that was put down by the first book. However, I soon realized that wouldn't work for the simple reason that I needed a break from that storyline, a detour from the universe that I had been writing in for so many months. So that was why I decided to write the Gates of Terror.
I started off with a capturing front page font to enhance the feeling of mystery around the story. Then I got to the writing. This story would be about a character whose house became haunted--toilets started flushing all by themselves, night-tables appeared where they hadn't been before, rooms started enlarging, and paranormal horror stories of the like. I had one doubt about my ability to make the story succeed, however: in order to create a capturing and engaging plot, I would need to make the story long, and I wasn't such a fan of super-long, 400-page stories. A New Dimension had only been 36,000 words, or 170 pages, and even nowadays I only tend to write between 30,000 to 35,000-word novels, which qualifies most of my work as novellas. Still, I had a strong feeling I could bring the Gates of Terror to fruition if I worked hard enough on it.
Things were going along smoothly until I hit a bump in the road, as they say. I had written almost 100 pages worth of suspense and mystery, and I was just getting to the final few chapters when I had a great idea: I would add a twist to the plot by having the main character encounter a river with an odd yellow mustard-like substance drifting downstream. Little did I know that this would be the plot addition that would ruin the whole story. Once I added it, the whole thing seemed to go down the drain--I couldn't continue, because I couldn't figure out how to link the new idea into the rest of the story; I couldn't convince the reader that this yellow mustard-like substance in the river would go on to play a huge part in the final chapters of the story, because, the truth was, the idea didn't make any sense in the context of the rest of the story. It simply didn't fit in. Because of this, the entire story crashed.
I never went back and finished the Gates of Terror, because there was no reason to. That one bad idea had brought the whole thing down, and now the story was sitting at 30,000 words without a proper ending. Of course, I could've just abruptly capped it off right there, but I felt like the quality of the ending would be low, and many readers would feel that the yellow mustard idea didn't play any part whatsoever in the story, and that the Gates of Terror wasn't a very good book. Since then, I have always been very cautious about what types of ideas I put in my books, and I'm always on the lookout for ideas that may look fun and interesting to drop in from the outside, but turn your story into a mess on the inside. As I will mention in the next paragraph, I decided to write another book almost immediately after the Gates of Terror disaster. My concern about this, though, was that I was quite upset after the incident, and I was afraid that this would affect my ability to write any other book again. Fortunately, this wasn't true, and things went a lot better when I was writing the next book than I had anticipated. The quality of writing in Secrets of the Shopkeeper (the name of the next book) was not affected at all, although the length of the book was much shorter, since I had learned my lesson from the Gates of Terror that length is not the most important thing about a book.
After quitting the Gates of Terror, I went on to write the sequel for A New Dimension, because I had no hope of finishing Gates of Terror at that point. The transition was a little bit tricky since I was a bit crestfallen after giving up on the Gates of Terror, but I managed to pull through. Since I'd gotten my head out of the New Dimension universe for a little while, I felt that it was the right time to begin another book. And while Secrets of the Shopkeeper (the name of the sequel) had a few rough spots, I managed to finish it at 26,000 words, or 105 pages. It was certainly one of the shorter stories I've written, but I think it was for the better, because what really matters is the quality of your ideas and the construction of the story, not the length. I think that was what made the Gates of Terror go down the drain: I was too focused on making it long and complex, and, as a result, made too many mistakes on the subject of adding ideas. I think this tragic experience helped to shape how I write books nowadays; every time I think about adding a new, wild, and crazy idea, I think to myself: will this fit in with the rest of the book? I'm not saying that this incident has discouraged me to add new ideas to a developing plot, but I'm allowing myself to stop and think for a moment about what I'm about to add to my story.
Unfortunately, in a file-corruption incident a few months ago, the Gates of Terror file was removed from the cloud forever. If it hadn't been, I would've already tried to start it back up and finish it. However, I know now that writing isn't something that you can just sit down out of nowhere and do: once you have the ideas you want to put down on paper, you have to judge them to see if they're the right fit for your story, just like purchasing car parts to see if they're the correct match for your car. Overall, I think this was a learning experience that I should recognize as not a tragedy but an opportunity to improve my writing skills.
Comentários