20: Whatās the most time youāve ever spent on one WIP?
The longest time Iāve spent on a WIP?
Ok so, Iām going to be up front right now and admit that Iāve never fully finished a single original WIP. So, I canāt answer this with regards to a WIP I took from start to finish.
However, I do have several long standing projects.
I feel like the obvious answer to this question is to say the Novel Version of Survivors, my long form Outlast fic. This one gets special attention because itās definitely without fail, my longest standing WIP that I continuously work on. Iāve been writing the fanfic version continuously since early 2014, and I decided to do an original novel version of it a year later. Iāve gone through several different versions of the opening scenes, Iāve renamed āWaylonāsā character at least three times, and Iāve even jumped genres once and completely re-imagined the setting three times as well. This particular WIP has had the most effort put into setting, plot, characterization, and world building. This particular story has been kicking around on various word docs for.... nearly 7 years. (No, itās nowhere near being done cuz I keep wandering over to the fic version)
Runners up:
Test Tube Zombie was the first time I got āseriousā about a novel idea outside of high school. I worked on it pretty frequently from around 2012 into 2014, before mostly abandoning it for Survivors. This WIP also had a few different rewrites of the intro, two different setting changes, and frequent characterization changes. I brought the idea back once in... hard to pin down because I lost the draft of this, but I want to say late 2014 to early 2015 for a sci-fi novella contest I never ended up entering. This version of the story was greatly changed from the original idea, completely redoing the setting and characters, but keeping a similar premise. I would say the total time I worked on various iterations of Test Tube Zombie would be... 4 years? I feel comfortable with that.
Slayers/Project Monster/Monster was something I started back in high school as a comic project. The earliest picture I have of the main character dates back to 2008. For this WIP I did three separate comic versions before scrapping the story as a comic and moving it to a written novel format. This project has not been something that I worked on continuously. BUT Iāve dumped a lot of time into world building and setting and genre. Iāve redone the characters several times, and Iāve put a lot of thought into as a story as Iāve gotten older. The only reason I bring it up, is that a couple years ago, probably 2013 or 2014, I did actually seriously start working on a horror version of it for a NaNoWriMo entry. The comic I easily spent 4 years on while getting nowhere, and the novel version has been kicking around in my mind since 2011, however, I probably only spent two months on the actual word doc WIP for the latest version.
Honorable Mention:
Middle school aged me, hand wrote a story about dragon people and bird people who didnāt like each other and also had to deal with humans that sucked. I diligently hand wrote this story between two different notebooks and a bunch of loose leaf, with the page count easily going into 150+. I worked on it pretty hard for about two years, before dropping it in favor of drawing comics. The worst part of this, is that Iām pretty sure I lost one of the notebooks containing the bulk of this story. Which is pretty crushing. I used to write a lot by hand in middle and high school, as I didnāt have steady access to a computer until I got my laptop my senior year.
Iām missing similar notebooks for early fanfiction I did, and elementary school projects I also hand wrote.