Why there's no part four

This week I worked on a five-part story, writing one part per weekday. The idea behind it was to make the protagonist choose between his creative work and his family. The idea was based on a story I heard some time ago about someone who moved from the U.S. to Amsterdam to follow her dreams, even though her mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. Twenty years later she had accomplished her dreams and her mother was still alive. But her siblings had given everything up to stay with their mum. I wanted to write about this theme. The problem is that the core conflict in my story didn't work. In my setup, the protagonist already had an existence elsewhere. There was no reason for him to not simply visit his family. Whenever I tried to set up the conflict, it didn't fit into the story. This explains sentences like "My brother wants me to move back to Scotland," in part two that stand out as strangely unfitting.

Writing the second part was already difficult. By part three I knew that my plan wouldn't work. So I tried to follow James, the protagonist, to see where it would lead me. It didn't lead me anywhere.

One way to write a story is to create likeable characters and to let bad things happen to them. Let's forget for a moment that James doesn't really have a character and think about what the worst thing is that can happen to him. Maybe his mum dies while his brother is fetching him from the airport. Now they both weren't with her, and his brother may be pissed at him. But there's not much of a conflict here. James would just go back to his own life. There's no way to revive the conflict I had in mind when I started writing. It is impossible to find a satisfying ending to it.

Writing this story has been an experiment. And it didn't work. That's all right. If you never fail at anything it means you're not trying hard enough. The story didn't work because I didn't plan enough. If you're writing a manuscript for a novel, there will always be parts where you make the wrong decision. That's part of the process. But since it's only the first draft you can go back and take a different route. The easiest fix for my story would be that James is still living with his parents, and only plans to move out. But because I had already published the first part, I could no longer change this decision. I still could have finished the story. I could have followed James for two more parts. It wouldn't have been a satisfying ending, but it would've been a five-part story. I didn't. Ultimately, I decided to abort this story because it drained me.

Writing each morning is one of the best things I do. It's relieving to know that however the day goes, I've worked on a creative experiment, or reflected about something that was bothering me. The writing was always hard, but it game me energy. This story was different. It was the thing I procrastinated most on since I started publishing one post per day. And even without counting the procrastination, writing it took longer. I haven't done anything else this week. Either I wrote this story, dreaded about it, or distracted myself to not think about it. I still find writing fiction interesting. Maybe I'll no more of it in my daily blog. I'm not yet sure about the best approach to do it. I only know that it didn't work like I tried it this week.

If you want to still read the first three parts, here's a link to the first part.