What a contrived title. But hear me out.
Any fan of Doctor Who has at least heard of Douglas Adams's six-party Season 17 finale Shada. Due to industrial action at the BBC, the serial never finished production, and attempts have been made in the 1990s (narrated stringing together), 2003 (radio remake) and 2018 (part-animated remake) to bring the story back in non-text form. But Adams, who disliked the story anyway, found ways of recycling elements of his Doctor Who tenure in his own work. His original finale was reworked into Life, The Universe, and Everything, while a character from Shada was put into his first Dirk Gently novel with enough separation that he wasn't infringing copyright.
Hearing the saga of Shada, and how Adams recycled elements of his unrealized work in later projects, made me think about something of how I approach writing. While it's hard to 'take the L' as the phrase goes, sometimes you have to admit a project can't be realised. It won't work narratively, it's not what you want to do, you hit an insurmountable story issue that can't be fixed without breaking the in-game world beyond repair or rewriting from the top down. It may just be an idea that didn't get beyond the concept stage.
I realise that, in writing, some things inevitably get left at the wayside. It's just part of the process. Recycling other writing isn't just the domain of AI generation, but part of the creative process so long as you're recycling your own. There have been times when I've just had to drop an entire series because it wasn't working for whatever reason, however much that hurts the ego. If it's not working, or you no longer feel for it, why go on banging your head against a brick wall?
There are graduations of abandoned or not-working ideas. It can be something that only gets as far as jotting down a rough premise or a plan, which you leave aside and end up forgetting about. It can be the first paragraphs, or even the first chapters if it's long form, of a story that peters out for whatever reasons. In the worst case, it can be a series you wanted to carry through and complete, but it ended up just not going further than one and a little bit books. I'm not counting the author's death into this example, but a living author just not having the will to finish this work for whatever reason. Quality reasons, market trends, it just not sitting right, anything can trip up even what someone may think will be the defining magnum opus of their existence.
My Cluster Cycle series was, in part, a rapid scrabbling together of multiple abandoned story ideas with the overall concept of sci-fi tales based on old stories. How's that working? Don't know yet, the first one's only just released from a smallish American publisher. And it's early days. Another series I'm writing for them, an adventure series, had a big hiccup where I needed to just abandon a book completely as it was straying outside my own and my accessible knowledge base. I recycled some chapters of it in the penultimate book, so the research and some of the writing came in useful after all, but otherwise that story's lost to time. And I never really liked it anyway.
I'm sure there's plenty of other stories of authors who had to drop projects, or never really liked them and recycled any salvageable bits into their other projects. It's likely a more common story than many might want to admit. Authors, and I know this for a fact, have ten times more story ideas than they can normally put to electronic or physical paper in one lifetime. And sometimes they try putting those ideas to paper, and think 'This wouldn't work in a million years' and leave it in their notebooks to pick up later.
That's not a bad thing. Just because you can't realise one idea doesn't mean you can't realise them all. It just means that idea didn't gel. Sometimes, you need a few years, or a new premise, and something from that other project can be brought back into being.
Oh, and yes I've experienced Shada. I do like classic Doctor Who, and I was curious. Want my opinion? It's okay, I guess. I like the audio version best.
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