Resurrecting

Am I the only one that has partially finished manuscripts and stories languishing around in notebooks and bits of paper.

How do you determine if they still have life in them somewhere or they are dead, really dead, really door-know dead-dead?

I came across something recently that was talking about how to resurrect a stalled manuscript.

There were some interesting ideas, like doing research, if you are stalled. Take a bit of time to do research on your characters and find out more details that might give you a better grip on your characters, and thus your story.

It also talked about the conflicts in the story. Whether large or smaller. Taking a look at the conflicts, it suggested playing ‘What If’ with the characters and situations. That question alone can send most writers I know in so many different directions, that they won’t have to worry about jumper-cable-ing their story again.

Going along with previous post I did where I mentioned some writers keep their readers / critiques groups to their genre, one of these suggestions about if you are stuck, is to try writing in another genre.

I already write a bit of all over the place, so that’s not something I think about a lot. As to my writing anyway. I think about it in terms of marketing, but not with me as a writer.

A lot of other writers seem to stick to a particular genre, and type of story, and don’t understand my ‘eclectic’ needs to tell a story differently. But I’m okay with that. And now I found out that it can be a way to paddle-shock a dead or stalled story. Cool.

So what about you? Would you, have you, thought about writing something other than what you have / are used to?

Have suggestions for stalled or dead writing? And how to determine which is on the certificate - Revive, or Pull the Plug?