When should you move on from an idea?

It might surprise people how old many of my story ideas are. This isn’t always the case – next year's High-Rise, for example, was conceived literally days before I pitched it to my publisher, while The Hitchhiker came about because Audible were looking for a contained Wolf Creek type story and I’m a working writer who will say yes to almost anything that secures me a contract, then make the story work after the fact.
 
But other stories have had a much longer genesis. Anyone who halfway knows about my writing life will be aware of the tortured saga that is my dream project Windmills (still yet to be published with no sign of that changing soon). The Hunted, published in 2020, started out as a horror movie concept in 2011. Andromache Between Worlds, published this year, was originally conceived when I was writing the Boone Shepard books in 2013. And Boone himself originated during my high school days, well before those books were published and before he reappeared in Andromache.
 
I don’t think I’ve ever wholesale thrown out one of my older ideas. The truth is, there aren’t that many concepts I’ve seriously considered that I haven’t at least attempted to write at some point, and even if the writing doesn’t go the way I want it to, I’ll usually file it away as something to revisit down the line. As recently as last year I was playing with reviving a concept I came up with in primary school. This isn’t to indicate that any or all of these nascent childhood/adolescent attempts have inherent value, but rather than once I’ve lived in a story for any amount of time it's extremely hard for me to entirely let go. This isn’t to imply that every idea that has ever mattered to me is something I’ll one day pursue (except for Windmills, which it’s fair to assume I’ll be trying to get published until I go into the crematorium), but more that its not uncommon for me to periodically consider whether that half-baked concept I tried to write as a teenager might have something worth exploring today. To be fair, it worked for Boone Shepard. 
 
Part of this is, weirdly, pragmatism. Being an author fundamentally is being a freelancer, and even when you’re in the midst of one contract you’ll tend to find yourself thinking ahead to the next one, to what you might have in your head that could be worth pitching if the need arises. 
 
One concept I’ve come back to a few times over the years is Phoenix. I’ve discussed this one before but to recap; Phoenix was a web series I made with some friends in 2010. It was about five teenagers surviving in a house after a nuclear war. It was shot in black and white and edited on Windows Movie Maker. It was exactly as terrible as you think it was.
 
When I first developed Phoenix, teenage me had planned for an extensive, epic mythology and long-game twists and reveals. I envisioned something enormous and never once considered the limitations of how I’d tried to realise it. So when the series proved to be a bit of a joke among our friends and everyone involved decided they had better things to do than make something that existed to be laughed at, we let the series peter off after just sixteen of a planned thirty episodes.
 
Already the next year I was trying to convince friends to make a kind of ‘rebooted’ version, starting the story again with reimagined episodes. The year after that, I wrote much of my story arc into the first of a planned five book Phoenix novel series. I figured that free from the limits of a no budget web series made by a team with no film experience, all those awesome ideas I’d had would shine.
 
They… did not. I mean I think that book was probably as fine as anything I was writing in 2012 could have been, but I knew I hadn't written anything earth shattering and didn’t feel much inclination to forge on. Until, a couple of years later, I did, making a crack at a second book despite nobody having shown much interest in the first. That too, went nowhere. 
 
The weird thing here is that Phoenix was never one of those ideas like Windmills or Boone Shepard that I loved so dearly I would do everything in my power to see it realised. I don’t think I was ever all that passionate about it. But that’s kind of my point – even Phoenix, I struggled to let go of.
 
The other night I was thinking ahead to what I might move on to once my next Audible is finished. I spun again through the mental rolodex of old ideas and again Phoenix came up.
 
But it struck me that I no longer had that untrustworthy little voice saying “you know, maybe now it could work…” I just didn’t have that feeling of unfinished business or unrealised potential that characterises so much of what I’ve repeatedly returned to over the years. When I open the mental folder branded Phoenix, there’s just nothing in there I want to pull out to re-use.
 
Has time finally taught me to let go of weaker ideas? No. See, the difference with Phoenix is that unlike so many of those other old concepts, I did eventually finish it, just not in the way I would have expected or thought much of at the time.
 
I covered this fairly extensively in a contemporaneous blog post, but in 2021 the cast of Phoenix got together and shot a final episode. There was never any intention for this to see the light of day and it never will, but we did it for ourselves, as a fun exercise in nostalgia. We spent a weekend together, filmed the episode, edited it in Movie Maker (it was important to be faithful to the old style), and then got drunk and watched the whole series from its 2010 beginning to 2021 ending. It was a beautiful little tribute to our formative years that we did purely for us. No, the new episode wasn’t good, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do it how we used to and put this silly thing that once united us to bed.
 
So the other day, when Phoenix popped up as a concept to potentially revisit, I was pretty quickly able to say “probably not though”. And the reason wasn’t because I felt like there was nothing worthwhile there or that it wouldn’t make for a potentially good YA series with the right tinkering, it was because whatever itch I had to scratch with that story was gone. I’d finished it.
 
In general the stories you tell as a working writer will on some level be dictated by the market. If you release a book that’s part of an intended series only for said book to flop, then there likely won't be a lot of publisher enthusiasm for another. But that doesn’t mean you as the author can just let go. When you put time and effort and care into the development of a story and the characters who populate it, that doesn’t just go away because the story wasn’t as well received as you’d hoped. And that can leave you in a weird position where you are left with a need for catharsis that very few others are demanding and very few options to achieve it. Can you really put time and effort into writing a story that you know will likely never see a public release, at the expense of something that might?
 
The Phoenix finale was obviously a unique case where it wasn’t going to take a huge amount of time out of anyone’s life to make and to boot it would be a fun exercise in nostalgia for old friends who never see each other anymore. Other examples are a bit trickier. When The True Colour of a Little White Lie underperformed, it meant that the sequel I’d already written, A Different Type of Ordinary, had no real path to release, let alone the third book I’d been planning. I’m still vaguely toying with the idea of releasing it online or something, just to let the rest of the story be told, but then I wonder if doing so would distract from the work I should be promoting, and so that book remains in the drawer.

Then there’s Boone. The first Boone Shepard novel did better than it should have. The second was a step down. The third got a stunted print-on-demand release that marked an obvious decrease in quality but meant I got to finish the story and say goodbye. And that’s a prime example of what I’m talking about here – I always knew that Boone himself would reappear in the Andromache novels but he’s effectively a minor character.  Since the release of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice in 2018, I’ve had no desire to try and tell another Boone Shepard story, even as a play or a short story or something. I’m not convinced I could find his voice anymore. When I open the mental Boone Shepard folder, like with Phoenix, there’s nothing there for me anymore. His story has been told.
 
Boone and Phoenix are outliers. As I said before I don’t think I’ll ever let go of trying to get a version of Windmills into the world. Maggie and Jack Carlin, ideally, have a lot of mileage left to go and indeed you’ll get plenty of the two of them in The Lodger and High-Rise. Andromache Peters is just getting started. But I’m also under no illusions here – the moment you’re not just writing for yourself anymore, you don’t have that much say over what comes next no matter how much you might want to write something. 
 
But this is also true; once you’ve started a story, you're compelled to finish it, for yourself as much as for anyone else. If you don’t, it will just keep on bugging you until you find a way to put it to bed.