Lost Endings

This isn’t about anyone specific.  This is just something that can be irritating sometimes that I wanted to rant about.  

People seem to think that when I tried to write novels I actually knew what I was doing.  

I didn’t.  

First, I thought I was really awesome at writing fiction, second, when I started writing a new novel (which I did a few times a week or sometimes even a few times a day) I would have no idea what I was doing with it, where it would end up, who would live or who would die.  Spoiler:  almost everyone was going to die.  

Sometimes I would just have a title and a random paragraph from some random spot in the middle.  I would have no idea what happened after that short paragraph or how I got there.  Normally I just had a sentence or character and went with it.  

I tried to plot out novels a few times because I would have no idea where it was going but I would get tired of the plot I had written down so I would go back and erase the parts that disagreed with what I wanted to write.  

After a few attempts at writing out the plot before writing the novel I gave up.  

I was better at short stories because I could finish it in a day if I really tried and I was less likely to go back and change everything.  

A lot of the reason the plots in my novels got messed up is because I would be awake at two AM staring at the ceiling wondering what the meaning of life was when I would suddenly wonder what my novel would be like if I switched something.  Or maybe one character dies (most of them did).  Or maybe I would rewrite the entire thing because I wanted to change one detail.  

I’m kind of getting off topic.  I started writing this with a specific idea of what it was going to say and now I’m getting off topic and rambling.  Nothing has changed.  

Anyway, sometimes I talk to people about the stuff I used to write and after I explain roughly what happens in the beginning and weird, random middle parts that don’t fit in with anything, people ALWAYS ask how it was going to end.  

I have no idea.  

If I know how it ends I’m probably confused about how it starts.  

The middle is always kind of fuzzy and confusing.  

THE POINT OF THIS IS, if you want to talk about my old writing (and it’s perfectly fine to want to talk about it, I really don’t mind) don’t get irritated when I don’t know how some parts will go.  I started most of my wannabe novels when I was around ten or eleven, it’s been YEARS since I started writing all of them, and some of them just got printed and buried in my closet because I hated everything about them (for example:  WINDOW WORLD.  That’ll be buried in my closet forever.  If I find it, I’m burning it).  If I did know how it ended I really don’t know now.  

Why I don't Write Fiction

Before I started playing guitar I was pretty sure I was going to write novels.  

When I say pretty sure, I don’t mean that I kind of wrote a little in my spare time, I mean that I was pretty sure I could write an entire novel and get it published before high school and be the next JK Rowling.  

Yeah.  No.  

The beginning of the end started with The Window World.  I wanted to be original, so I didn’t want to write something about a mirror world, and I thought a window world would be so creative and probably NO ONE had ever done something like that before.  

So I started writing The Window World.  The plot went something like this:  Girl gets mad at her parents for some stupid reason, she goes down into her basement bedroom, and wishes she was somewhere else.  SOMEHOW the glass in the window beside her is magic and her combination of words was close enough to the spell to take her through the window and then there she is in the window world.  

Confused yet?  

So when she gets into the window world (which she thinks is just like her world but creepy, because she’s still in what looks like her house), she meets a crazy old woman and her long lost sister.  In the original copy I had her figuring out that this girl was her sister one page after she showed up.  So then some evil guy shows up, he dies, the main character (I think her name was Kristen) goes upstairs and finds HER EVIL/CRAZY WINDOW WORLD DOUBLE.  I’m not kidding.  I originally thought that the window world copies would be the reverse of each other, but I kind of abandoned that after I decided to make it a love story.  Looking back, it could have been more interesting if I had gone with that and forgotten the love story.  Anyway, then an evil plant called The Weed takes over the house and the the evil window world double dies.  

Still following?  Great.  

Then a long period of time is skipped and it goes to an awkward romance that seems very forced and weird because I wrote this when I was ten and eleven and I didn’t know how to write a believable love story.  

I’m not even going to mention what happens happens with the awkward romance BECAUSE IT’S FREAKING EMBARRASSING WHAT I THOUGHT A LOVE STORY WOULD BE LIKE.   

The things my younger self thought make me cringe.  

At some point in the story Kristen’s long lost older sister got a boyfriend.  He died.  I think the long lost sister died too.  And Kristen’s boyfriend, he’s dead, too.  

After a while I would get sick of writing about a character so I would just kill them- PROBLEM SOLVED.  I wouldn’t have to write about them anymore!  

But I killed literally every main character except for Kristen and the crazy woman.  

My writing REALLY started to crash and burn when I decided to write a novel based on my life.  

I was twelve.  

I hadn’t really done enough living to be able to base a whole novel off of my life, but I thought that I would just go with it and see how it turned out.  

No.   

I decided that it wouldn’t be completely about my life, I would just name the main character after me.  Or my best friend.  Or after my favorite book character.  Whatever, at least they had a name.  

So then I decided that the book would be about a girl finding who she really was and finding a best friend and just being cool and learning to love her flaws.  

...I got three pages into writing that one before I got bored and started writing about unicorns.  

I really knew it was the end recently when I started to write a short story.  

First, I wrote about a page and and then decided that it would all be in present tense.  After I changed the tense in the entire story so far, I wrote a little bit more.  And then I just got bored with it.  I realized a few days after writing the first page that I wouldn’t actually read this short story, and I should really stop.  

So now I stick to nonfiction like this, and songs and poetry about my life.  

Hopefully, this will go better than the nonfiction I wrote when I was younger.  When I was ten I tried to write my own autobiography.  It was just a four page list of people I didn’t like and why I didn’t like them.  I really didn’t like them.  It was apparently the whole of my world.