Story Progress: Trash the Entire Troll Backstory or Not?

The more I write anything about the troll portion of my novel, the more I struggle. I find myself less and less motivated to write it because it’s awkward and very difficult to write. There’s some severely controversial parts but the real problem is consistency along with endless spawns of ideas.

Part of the original idea for this section of my story is that it could’ve been made into a separate book. But the plot keeps meandering all over the place and I don’t feel closer to where I need to be on a daily basis. I can’t even outline what should happen because I’ve attempted to write this section on a pure organic level where things show up naturally.

However, my dilemma is that I never know which direction I should go and often find myself forcing myself to come up with ideas to keep the basic plot from being too dry in arriving at key elements in the story. The worst part is that the story telling itself lacks the quality I really want and the characters aren’t fleshed out all that well.

Of all the things positive coming out of this experience it’s that I started to section off chapters, which makes the writing a little more coherent. My main document is just too large and overbearing, making it impossible to fact check myself. So splitting things apart has been a good practice. Also, it forces me to keep with a smaller central idea in each chapter.

Despite this practice the ideas still aren’t coming together and I feel like I’m forcing myself to write pages for the sake of writing pages as opposed to writing a quality story. I’m happy with the previous stuff as everything felt more natural. This part doesn’t though which is why I’m leaning towards just putting it in its own document and letting it sit there while I work out a new plot that is simpler overall.

It’s disappointing to say the least that I spent all that time trying to come up with ideas only to realize in the end that my direction was keenly off. But I prefer to have consistent quality in my writing as well as better story telling than forcing myself to come up with ideas that I’m only 50% barely content with.

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