Unfinished Things

[rowyn]

I was talking to bard_bloom about unfinished projects yesterday. Bard has a number of projects in the works, a couple of which were abandoned, and was saying how it wouldn't let itself start any new projects until it had some milestones on existing ones.

I said that I knew what Bard meant; I'd resolved not to start any new RPG campaigns until I finished some of the current ones. "New stories I don't mind starting."

"Why's that different?" Bard asked.

And then I got distracted by something and never responded.

But it's been on my mind: why is it different?

I think part of it is momentum on a campaign is different from momentum on a book or a story. It's easy for me to lose momentum when writing on my own, but it's also easier to pick it back up again. To use an extreme example: I picked Prophecy back up again after a hiatus of over ten years.

Campaigns are more vulnerable. I have finished campaigns after breaks that lasted several months, but efforts to restart a campaign that's been idle for years have been rare and less successful. Actually, it wasn't until I started running games on Sinai that I got into the habit of finishing campaigns at all. Prior to that, the closest I came was bringing the occassional story arc in a game to a conclusion. Mirari was the first game I ever started with the intention of closing the story at some point. Of solving the great mystery and wrapping up the characters and putting the whole thing away. Of course, I anticipated doing so in a six-eight sessions and it actually took over 120, but hey, minor details.

Anyway, I do feel like starting a new game for me sucks much of the energy out of the existing one, and I like that satisfaction of finishing things.

With writing -- well, I still like the satisfaction of finishing things there, too.

But I still haven't figured out what works for me when writing. I finished Prophecy using the incredibly tedious Master Plan; it worked, yes. But the process was painful and largely joyless, and I wasn't happy with the final product. I finished Silver Scales with no special resolutions about working on it. I was euphoric through the entire final weeks of writing it, working harder than I'd ever done before and deliriously happy about it. And in general, happy with the book I produced (even if it is unpublishably long).

That's part of why I don't want to worry about not starting new projects while still working on the old. Because I didn't worry about it while I was writing Silver Scales and I love how that worked out.

I think another reason, though, is that my unfinished stories bring me some pleasure, too. When I look back at fragments of stories, I do often wish I'd finished them. But I'm also glad that I started them. And I always think, "I can still finish it, someday, maybe." With an unfinished campaign, the moment is passed. It's hard to get back players who've moved on, or to pick up the threads of a plot half-forgotten.

And I don't want to be known as the GM who always quits; the one who has a great start and no follow-through. Maybe it's just different when I've got other participants waiting on me.

Weirdly, it never occured to me until just now to think of art in these terms. I've never thought 'I should work on that painting instead of doing a new sketch'. Probably this is because I've never done the really big involved painting that take hundreds or thousands of hours to finish. If it took me as long to do a picture as to write a book ...

Well, I'd've given up art entirely by now in that case. :)

I'm sure everyone has this problem in one area or another. How do you deal with your unfinished things, and with the urge to do something new instead of working on an existing project?

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Very true, once you stop running the campaign regularly, getting everyone back on board can be quite a chore. People lose interest in anything that's not put before them regularly.

I have bunches and bunches of ideas that go nowhere, really. Even an RP campaign that basically stalled out before I started recruiting people for it. I just make the new ideas and file them away, they'll be useful someday.

But RP... Must finish it if I start it, because it's a commitment to the others, they want to see the story end too.

[iskandria.livejournal.com]

Campaigns also require a lot of "background knowledge" that isn't "sticky".

With voluminous background notes, it doesn't matter if I don't have a clue what I was thinking "in character" for a scene five months back; the notes will let me recover. More than a year...well, odds are good that I'll have to do consistency fixups somewhere. More than three years and unfinished...toss-up whether I'll have to do a major rewrite, or just declare it "alternate history" and make a note which background details have to be salvaged into other fiction.

Campaigns have no comparable safety net.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

How do you deal with your unfinished things, and with the urge to do something new instead of working on an existing project?

Poorly. :-) This is my eternal problem with my own projects -- I'm never able to get them completed (or even mostly completed, in many cases) before project-apathy, along with that new-project lustre, saps my attention from them. Lately I've taken to carrying a multisection notebook, just small enough to fit in the stuff pocket on my cargo pants, and I'm dedicating each of the sections to a different 'back-burner' project; this way I can take notes on them and not feel like I'm wasting any brain-time thinking about them, but at the same time I can dedicate most of my personal-project time to Fighting Words. (Now, if I were only able to devote more of my spare time to personal-project time... but that's another matter entirely.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I agree - and I don't think I would have even considered any controversy at the difference. If I am running a game, I have the players' own creations - their characters - in my hands. (And even if I made up the characters as "pregenerated", well, the players "adopt" them for the campaign and make them their own.) If I let things go on hiatus, I'm letting down the players ... and then there's the fog of starting things up again. It's bad enough just having a week go between sessions ... or, more often in my games, two weeks. (And on the occasion that I'm not available for a given weekend and moving the schedule forward or back a week just won't work for enough people, then there's a MONTH between sessions.) And the result of that is ... trouble with memory. Oh, sure, the main plot points are easy enough, but the subtle clues and such? You can't just scan back a few pages to refresh your memory. If I haven't underscored details as Important Clues, then if they haven't come to the forefront by the next session, they will probably be completely forgotten.

Make a hiatus even longer - months, let alone years - and it'd be a joke to expect players to remember much at all beyond the high points pertaining directly to their own characters.

With a book? If there's a break, I can go back and refresh myself. Even if I have an "audience," (or if I were doing a webcomic) they can go back and scan to get back up to speed.

And doing art? The whole thing in progress is generally right there on one page, or perhaps in several files collected in a single folder on my PC. It's not hard to get back up to speed. Unless I'm late for a deadline, I'm not letting anyone down by putting the brakes on it for a while, the same way I would with just letting a campaign drop.

[rowyn]

My campaigns tend to have more safety net than my stories, actually. Since I do all my RP online, I have complete records of all the sessions, often including OOC commentary between GM and players. I'm also more likely to write down future plans and ideas for campaigns.

By contrast, with stories I often dive write in with no preparation. Not that I'm recommending this strategy. It's just my default mode. :)

[rowyn]

Poorly.

Bwahaha! Come to think of it, that pretty much sums me up, too. I guess I'm getting better at it -- I have been finishing *some* things this decade, which is better than I was doing through most of the 80s and 90s. ;) But I haven't been working on anything as complex as a computer game, either.

I like the notebook idea; I carry one in my purse but I don't use it for project concepts. I think my mind resists writing things longhand because I'll have to transfer them to computer eventually.

[rowyn]

In theory, getting back up to speed on an online RPG is doable. In practice, reading through old logs in their entirety to look for Important Stuff gets kinda tedious.

I think the 'letting players down' is the critical point for me. Even though I'm presumably letting my readers down by not finishing the Scales story arc, I don't feel the same obligation to an audience that I do to fellow participants in a project.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

As much as I'd love to read more Scales, I'm sure it'll pick up nicely once you get back around to it. ;)

(We just may have to wait until all the butterflies flutter by first....)

[iskandria.livejournal.com]

"Seize the climax, then retrofit?"

Not really comparable...diving in with no preparation ("seize the climax") is illusory with a full-blown setting, the setting is the preparation.

---

I find software projects (both internal and client-side) also easy to suspend/resume. This is a matter of emotional responses (my clients aren't this way).

I don't "freeze up" just because my todo-list for a project has 40+ strategic-level items. It really would be unmanageable if I had to skim every single item's full description before prioritizing.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

Almost all the GM's I've gamed with have been "campaign quitters"; I've only ever been in one campaign that was seen to its fulfilling conclusion. (Or any conclusion, for that matter.) It can be frustrating for the players; whereas when writing a new story, the only person affected really is yourself.