How to continue with a botched-up story?

[Hiye]

Hello, there, fellow artists. I have a rather strange question...

Well, first of all, I quit working on my comic about a year ago due to lack of time, and in the past few months or so I've been yearning to return to it.

However, though I'm in love with my characters, I no longer have interest in the story. I've spent a long time developing them and I would hate to throw them away. But, I also have an incredibly hard time coming up with stories/plots. So, in fact, I have no idea what to do with my characters or even what kind of comic to make with them.

So, I'm not sure what to do - continue with a story I dislike? Take the characters out and create a new story with them altogether? Start a new kind of comic altogether?

Thanks a lot for any insights
My comic is at http://hiye.keenspace.com by the way.

[Dutch!]

If you like your characters, use them again. Turf out the old story and stand them on their own. The characters are the important part. The story should be secondary. If the characters are strong enough they'll almost write your story for you.

So yeah, pull them out of the wherever they are and put them on a blank slate and see how they colour it.

Good luck.

[Joel Fagin]

Dutch just said that the characters were the most important part.* I'm going to appear to disagree but the context is different.

The story is the important part of a non-gag comic. If it's bad, it does need to be changed. I would start again. Using the same characters is probably a good idea, since they're fleshed out now.

- Joel Fagin

* Mind you, that's at least partially down to personal preference. some people prefer devious, intricate plots.

[Jeffy]

Do what I did, start the comic over with a completely different story but with the same characters. Of course, some of my characters are a bit different, but generally the same.

[Hiye]

Aha, thanks guys I think I've got a decent story worked out for the next one... I'd hate to give up 40 pages and a year of work, but oh well... that's indecision for ya

[Dutch!]

Maybe.

[Christwriter]

Well, don't give up the 40 pages. Keep 'em on the site...somewhere, and tell people "These are the horrible, awful pages I used to start the story with. I don't know why you'd want to look at them, but here they are:"

People will look, people will tell you it's not that bad.

CW

[Jeffy]

Well, don't give up the 40 pages. Keep 'em on the site...somewhere, and tell people "These are the horrible, awful pages I used to start the story with. I don't know why you'd want to look at them, but here they are:"

People will look, people will tell you it's not that bad.

CW

yepper, that's what I did, I had some... 110-ish actual comics

[Cortland]

Wow. I've actually had this problem myself, suddenly finding I've written my characters into a bad corner and can't write them out again. I've thought about pulling some kind of Deus ex Machina to sort out the loose ends I don't like, but just starting over works, too.

[RemusShepherd]

If the characters are strong enough they'll almost write your story for you.

I'm quoting Dutch here because he's said the wisest thing in this thread. *IF* the characters are strong enough, they'll carry the story. Their reactions to each other and to events in the story should be enough to make the plot roll along.

If that's not happening, then maybe your characters are not as interesting as you think they are. They're your children, so of course you love them, but try to be honest and measure how useful they really are in furthering your plot.

You could scrap it all and start over. But if the characters are weak, you'll end up in the same situation.

What I'd suggest is to give your characters new things to which they should react. New characters can serve as a foil for your existing characters, making their personalities come forth. (This is the base of the old writing advice, 'When in doubt, add ninjas.' ) New events, like disaster, birth or death, can also force your characters to act and interact with others. Be cruel to them -- poke and prod them like worms under a scalpel until you start getting their honest reactions.

When you give them all this new stimuli, make sure they don't all react in the same way. You need to have their personalities diverge, to have them think and act differently. Then the plot will arise naturally as, when faced with a situation, one character will say, "Let's do this", and another will say, "No, this is what we should do." That conflict between characters is what dramatic plots are all about.

[Faub]

The story was supposed to be simple. It's about a little girl from a faerie world who crossed into our world, did something wrong and got punished for it. The goal of the story was to present psychological and relgious debates from the point of view of a person outside the culture, right?

Wrong.

In the first 28 pages, everything went pretty much as planned. In the next 28 pages, the secondary characters started grabbing screen time, creating their own plot holes that had to be filled. The faerie girl lost the lime light and the human characters took over. The story is now a complex political and police drama about a little girl who met the wrong person.

Don't stick to your story if the characters do things that dictate otherwise. Follow the story where it leads. If your characters aren't capable of directing your story for you, you need to do some more character development. Anime, for example, uses flat, stereotypical characters who do nothing to complicate the storyline (the bad one, the smart one, the pretty one, the pervert, etc. It's like a boy band.).

The story is more important than the characters and the characters just follow the flow without really interrupting it. Each character has his or her own episode, a "defining event" that could have befallen any of the other characters and it would still be in character. (The bad one has a compassionate side. The good one has a history of loss or violence. The pervert was once a devoted husband/wife.) People aren't really like that.

Pull your stories from the people around you. Let the story build itself from a small event and follow it as it expands. You don't need to tie off loose ends if they can lead you somewhere interesting. Don't disregard little things either.

[Christwriter]

^
^
^
What he said.

CW

[Jackhass]

Same thing happened to me...I had characters I liked but for one reason or another I quit on the comic and didn't do anything with it for a year.

When I came back I started a new comic, with a new name and signed up for a new Keenspace account and everything...then I just carried the characters from the old comic I liked over to the new one.

[Turnsky]

everybody's getting the rewrite bug lately, i myself have been planning to redo a great deal of my own comic, it's actually to "flesh out" a great deal of my comic's overall story and plot, and to improve the writing in general,
(as well as an excuse to turf out some otherwise crappy looking comic =p)
it's also a better way to fill out the character's personalities, which i need to do, especially when it comes to alignment, i want to enforce my disbeliefs in absolutes (good, evil, shades of grey to me) where a character whom others saw as an evil bastard, i want to portray him as something more of a person doing what he believes has to be done for the greater good, come hell or high water.

stuff like that, i also want to round out things to try and make them seem "better' (for lack of a better word)

[Hiye]

Haha... it's not even so much that I've written to them in a corner or don't know how to continue; I could easily continue with the current story, but I find the theme so boring now that I don't even want to deal with it. I guess when I started this thing I wanted to do an emotional, character-centered drama about lost romance and angst and so on, but now I'm yearning for just the opposite. In fact, the whole idea of the current story pretty much irritates me now.

I suppose it's good I've figured out that plentiful yaoi does not a good story make