Saying goodbye to that WIP can be bittersweet..
by Anne R. Allen
I’ve recently had discussions with several writers who have been pondering saying goodbye to that WIP they’ve been laboring at for years.
All of them wanted to move on for different reasons. All of their reasons were valid.
Unfortunately, the writers felt it was wrong to let go. They had to battle all the messages writers see daily. You know, the ones that say, “never give up”, “you can’t fail unless you quit”, “quitting is for losers”, etc.
Here’s the thing: there are times when we need to accept that a particular book is not going to work, and our energy will be better spent on something new.
Writers need to look beyond one book to the big picture of a career
If we can’t let go, we can get stuck on a dead-end project and end up wasting money and time on edits and rewrites of a book that will never work.
That happened to me. I spent nearly a decade working on a big, literary novel and endlessly querying, workshopping and rewriting it before I realized the book just didn’t work.
It was wrenching to give it up. I put it in a fancy box and buried it in the back of my closet. The act felt like a funeral. But I knew I needed to do it to move on.
I later realized that none of the time I spent on that novel was wasted. I have mined the buried manuscript for the seeds of a bunch of short stories, essays, and two full novels. Abandoning it was one of the smartest moves I ever made.
So don’t be afraid to let a project go. Consider it a writing class that’s over now. You learned a lot by practicing on it, but you’re ready to move on.
Here are some signs that it’s time to graduate from that WIP.
1) You’re too Emotionally Close to the Material
A lot of people start writing a book—either a memoir or a novel— because they want to create something based on their own traumatic experiences.
They want to shake up the world with their stories, but they end up shaking up their own mental balance instead.
Many writers working on this kind of “based-on-my-true-story” book find that every time they work on the intensely emotional scenes, they have to put themselves back into that difficult time and relive the traumas they endured.
This can be cathartic for some, but for others, it can be increasingly painful.
When the writing goes on for years, working on the manuscript can become a source of real distress. It can also keep some people stuck in that traumatic event or time and unable to move on.
Sometimes the writer needs permission from a mentor or teacher to let the book go.
When they do, they often find they can mine the unfinished manuscript for creative nonfiction pieces and articles that can help other trauma victims, but they don’t have to live the whole experience again and again.
Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman said: “You can’t write about something until it’s over.” If you’re immersing yourself in that pain every time you write, the event won’t be truly over.
It’s okay to put the book away and do some healing before you tackle the subject again.
2) Your Premise Isn’t Exciting Enough
If your feedback is consistently negative or lukewarm, you may have a premise that’s not meaty enough to sustain a whole book.
By “feedback” I don’t mean agent rejections. Agent responses to queries are carefully worded to say as little as possible, and all they really mean is “this isn’t what our contacts in the business are asking for right now.” That isn’t real feedback.
But some writers put their WIP through dozens of workshops, critique groups and beta reads, and consistently get a resounding “meh.”
The groups and betas will probably offer a bunch of suggestions for fixes, so the writer will go home and rewrite the book again. And again.
But the problem may not be the writing. It may simply have a ho-hum premise.
Even though the author is still imagining that somebody will love Dryer Lint: the Story of my Miserable Job at the Laundromat,” it might be time to stop editing and re-editing and start working on something with a little more sizzle.
Try hanging out at the library or local bookstore and see what you’re drawn to. Then do some of the exercises Ruth Harris suggested last week for summoning the muse, and that catchy idea will probably come to you.
And maybe that laundromat ms. can be edited down to a poignant short story.
3) Your Skills Aren’t Yet up to the Concept.
Beginners are always full of grand ideas. You’re going to tell The Odyssey backwards, and make Penelope the hero. She becomes the real Homer, making up the stories and telling them through her tapestries. When she unravels them, characters die.
It all happens in an alternate universe where the Babylonian Empire is still in power and everybody in the government is named Gilgamesh.
You alternate the POV among 20 different characters, one of whom writes only in Mycenaean Linear B Script.
You’ve been trying to make this genius idea work for years, but somehow it never comes together. Every beta reader suggests you take a class on story structure because they have no idea what’s going on.
It might be time to let it go and try something a little more traditionally structured before you pick up your epic again.
Later you can go back to The Yessydo and apply your new expertise.
4) The Book’s Time has Come and Gone.
When you started this book many years ago, vampire teen romance was the Big Thing. You couldn’t go wrong with a vampire or werewolf paranormal. Especially in YA. So you set out to write Twilight meets True Blood, a vampire romance set in a high school in the Deep South. Since you went to high school in Alabama, you could draw on your own experience and add vampires. What could go wrong?
Well, what went wrong was the passage of time. It took a lot of years of practice to learn to write. And then to workshop the ms. and get it edited. You threw out the first two drafts and sent it to another editor. Then you started the slow, miserable query process.
You keep getting silence. Or rejections that come back within 5 minutes after you hit “send.”
Does your book suck?
Probably not, but vampires do right now. No matter how much you polish that book, it’s not going to sell. Even if you plan to self-publish, you probably won’t make a big splash in a tired, oversaturated genre.
5) You’re Trying to Pack Too Much into One Book.
Your concept was grand—huge. You’re writing War and Peace meets Gone with the Wind meets Infinite Jest. In space.
It is all about the things that really matter: love and peace and man’s inhumanity to man, and how to make the Universe a better place.
Yeah. It sounded so good. Eight years later, you’ve got 3000 pages of stuff that just doesn’t hang together.
This is the one that happened to me. I spent a decade working on my grand opus about the Baby Boomer Generation. Four women who wanted to change the world. I tried to follow their whole lives, over 5 decades.
There was just too much material for one book. I’m glad I set it aside and got more realistic about my expectations.
6) Your Premise has been Done to Death.
A lot of beginning writers set out to write “something that sells” without actually knowing the market.
This especially true of adults writing YA. Often they haven’t read any books for teens since they were teenagers, so they don’t know what’s out there. So if you’re writing about an unsuspecting “chosen one”, a portal to another world, a magical wizard academy, a post-apocalyptic dystopia, or anything with zombies, you’re going to have to come up with one big knock-their-socks off twist.
This is also true of literary fiction about the male academic with alcohol and prostate issues; the Eat Pray Love inspirational; and the thinly disguised memoir about your nasty break-up with your ex (the bastard.)
That isn’t to say you can’t possibly succeed if you take a well-travelled road. If you’re really passionate about the book and have a new take on the old trope it could work just fine.
But if you’re just slogging through this topic because you think “it sells”, consider starting something fresh that does excite your passions.
7) The Manuscript Needs More Work Than You Want to Put in.
You’ve been working on this thing for seven years. You’ve rewritten it more times than you can count. The book is DONE.
Then you take it to a professional editor for a polish.
But instead of a polish, she wants a massive rewrite. She says you won’t find readers for a 400,000 word YA paranormal romantic-suspense sci-fi novel. And she thinks that bringing in the aliens in chapter ten confuses the reader. In fact, she wants you to remove the whole alien subplot.
Also the one where your heroine’s roommate becomes an Uber driver who witnesses a mob hit and escapes by pretending to be a mannequin in the window of Macy’s on Thanksgiving Day and her long-lost lover shows up on the Toy Story float.
The Macy’s thing might be over-the-top, but you love it. You love it more than main part of the story about the vampire girl with the tattoo on the train to Hogwarts. In fact, you’re kind of sick of the main part of the story. The idea of spending another six months rewriting it fills you with dread.
Time to give the book a nice nap and move on to other stuff. Maybe you’ll be up to rewriting that Macy’s part as a fun rom-com later.
8) Somebody Else Has Written Your Book.
For a novel, this usually isn’t a problem. A novel with a similar premise to a bestseller can actually benefit from the other author’s sales.
But for nonfiction, it can be painful.
You lived through a historical event or survived a particular disease and the world needs to know about it. That need propels your writing and gives you passion and urgency.
Then somebody else, or a lot of somebodies, come out with books about the same illness or event. Some of these books are bestsellers. The authors go on all the talk shows and discuss what turns out to be the exact topic you address in your book.
But your manuscript still needs a huge amount of work, even though you probably started writing it before the *&#@ bestsellers did. Sometimes life is really unfair.
It’s time to start thinking outside the book.
Break what you’ve got into short stories, blogposts, and creative nonfiction essays you can publish immediately and ride the coat tails of the bestseller, without going up against it in direct competition.
9) You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling.
You develop Writer’s Block. But only when you’re working on the WIP. Every time you sit down to work on the book, you get ten great ideas for other stories you want to write.
You never think about the book when you’re not writing. In fact, the whole thing bores you silly. You don’t remember what’s supposed to happen to these characters and you don’t care.
If you’ve fallen that far out of love with a book, leave it. That lack of passion will show.
Don’t just dash off a sort-of adequate ending and publish. Seriously. DO NOT PUBLISH IT. I have heard way too many writers say, “I’m tired of working this novel! I’ll just self-publish it.”
This is a very bad idea, especially if you’re publishing for the first time and don’t know anything about marketing. In today’s overstuffed marketplace, it won’t go anywhere. And if it does sell a few copies, you may regret it. Even if you unpublish when you’re older and wiser, it will exist on somebody’s device, waiting to destroy your reputation.
Never publish a book because you’re sick of it. You can always revisit the project later, and maybe you’ll fall in love the second time around and fix whatever wasn’t working.
But for now, put it in the files, move on to the next thing, and say goodbye to that WIP.
By Anne R. Allen (@annerallen) April 1, 2018
What about you, scriveners? Have you ever abandoned a book? Did you have trouble saying goodbye to that WIP? What was involved in making that decision? Did you feel as if you’d lost a friend? Or did you feel relief?
This week on my book blog, I’m poisoning people again, and this time I’m talking about nerve agents, like the one that poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK last month.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
This week So Much for Buckingham is only 99c at Amazon for the ebook!
A satire of the dark side of online reviews and the people who make a game of them…a game that can lead to murder.
Camilla and Ronzo see their reputations destroyed by online review trolls who specialize in character assassination, while Plantagenet Smith heads over to England, where he encounters a dead historical reenactor dressed as the Duke of Buckingham. Plant is promptly arrested for the murder. In jail, Plant meets the ghost of Richard III, and hears what it’s like to live with character assassination “fake news” that has persisted for half a millennium.
“This wonderfully satiric comedy is a joy to read. On the surface, it’s a frothy romance cum suspense story about a whacky writer, Camilla, whose life is threatened by trolls and who topples from one hilarious disaster into the next.
But underneath, it provides a perceptive insight into the mad world of modern publishing, the sub-culture of Internet lunatics and the mindset of cultists who can – and do – believe ten impossible things before breakfast.
The reader is left with the question: how much of the story, perish the thought, might be true? Tremendous fun, wittily satiric and highly recommended”…Nigel J. Robinson
So Much for Buckingham is only 99c this week at all the Amazons,
Also available at
Kobo, Nook Smashwords, iTunes, Inkterra, Google Play, 24Symbols and Scribd.
And in paperback it is available at
Amazon, Amazon UK , and Barnes and Noble
Also in AUDIOBOOK! (see, we’re on trend here!)
available at Audible and iTunes
OPPORTUNITY ALERTS
Chautauqua’s Annual Editors’ Prize. $3 FEE. $1000 prize for winning story, essay or poem, plus publication in Chautauqua’s annual journal. The theme is “Moxie”. Using the online submission system, submit 3 poems totaling no more than 8 pages or up to 7,000 words of prose. Deadline April 15th.
Sixfold Poetry and Short Story Awards. $5 entry FEE. Two prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Sixfold are given quarterly for a group of poems and a short story. Using the online submission system, submit up to five poems totaling no more than 10 pages or up to 20 pages of prose. Deadline April 23.
Red Hen Press annual Nonfiction Contest. $25 entry FEE. $1,000 prize and publication by the prestigious Red Hen Press. They’re looking for an essay collection, memoir, or book of narrative nonfiction. Florencia Ramirez will judge. Using the online submission system, submit a manuscript of at least 150 pages. Deadline April 30
CRAFT Literary Short Story contest. $20 FEE. Short fiction up to 6000 words. $2000 first prize; the two runners-up will receive $500 and $300, respectively. plus publication in CRAFT Literary Magazine. Deadline April 30th.
Mad Scientist Journal: Battling in All Her Finery. Genre: Speculative fiction stories about women leaders in any field. No Reading Fee. Payment: 2 cents/word. Deadline: April 30, 2018.
13 Imprints of Big 5 publishers who take unagented submissions. From the good people at Authors Publish Magazine.
I might have hit that point myself.
Cramming too much – now that is definitely not a problem!
Some books take time to come together, but better to work on something else while the idea simmers than spend years only to discover you don’t want to ever see the story again.
Alex–So true! This is why it’s great to have some short stories or essays going that you can turn to when the WIP isn’t going well. You can return with fresh eyes, but you haven’t let your writing muscles go flabby.
And #10:
You’re no longer the same person who started the book.
That was my first novel. I started it when I was eighteen, but I couldn’t get it done because of skill gaps (getting stuck at the 1/3 point was a deal breaker at the time). I kept at it, trying different things, but didn’t have any luck. A friend suggested we do co-writing, and told myself that I could return to the book after we finished the proposed project. The next book gave me enough distance to realize that I wasn’t the same person who had started that book.
Linda–GREAT addition!! Yes. People grow and change. Something that excited your young self may be ho-hum as you gain maturity. Thanks for the great suggestion!
Lots of great ideas and guidance here. One other thought: put the unfinished/unfinishable book into a medically induced coma. Treat it with benign indifference while you move on to other projects. Sometimes, just the passage of time will let your subconscious solve the problem (see my post last week about the workings of the subconscious). Meanwhile, as Anne says, you can mine that baby for short stories/essays/blog posts or even recycle it into another book. Or two. Or three. 😉
Ruth–Yes! I did include a link to your post on the power of the subconscious. Putting that WIP in a back corner of your closet or files can let those ideas gestate in your subconscious. When you pick it up again, you may find the solution is now fully formed in your brain. Great suggestion!
Love this post, Anne, as sad as it was to contemplate. I haven’t hit that point yet, but then the volume hasn’t been anything to judge from. Always seems to be plenty of life happening, but it probably is writer’s block part of the time.
The only big miss in my view was the idea about telling the Odyssey backwards and killing people by unraveling. THAT I would run over people in line to buy- and then Mycenean B for a bonus! How can I fault any blog post that manages to refer to Mycenean B?
Nit-Pick Department: It’s not just now, Anne, in a very real sense vampires have ALWAYS sucked…
Will–I did have fun thinking up that one. I might have to think about writing it. Maybe as a short story. And yes, it’s true: vampires suck. So do vacuum cleaners. 🙂
All of my novels are romances. For some odd reason, I wanted to try my hand at writing in a different genre. But, the more I worked on my new WIP, the unhappier I got. The story was falling apart. Dying. I was sure that if there were such a thing as an EKG for storylines, mine would be flatlining. I was ready to walk away and plan its funeral.
Luckily, I have three great critique partners who saw the problem right away and slapped some sense into me. Romance is my THING. My first love. That’s the genre I needed to be writing. I gave the story some CPR by infusing several new scenes here and there and was able to bring it back to life.
Bottom line, I would have had to abandon this project if I hadn’t been able to bring it back into my comfort zone with those extra scenes.
Irene–Oh, do I relate! I tried to write suspense without the rom-com elements I always have in my stories… and what a mess! I can’t write without jokes. Still, it’s a good experiment. Finding out you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to do provides some peace of mind.
Yes, yes yes!! I have a few half-novels in my closet. The story that was haunting me, eating away at my brain, so that I had to write the first half, all the while knowing there was no market for it… The story I started ten years ago, where the first half rocked, and then…Gong – not enough plot for a novel. What a great post, Anne. I’m pointing all my students to this one.
Melodie–I think that’s one of the problems with being a novelist. We tend to think in terms of novels all the time. Those out-of-genre pieces might make good short stories, but as novels. they won’t work for us. I finally took one of my off-the-wall ideas and wrote it as a short piece last month, and I’m sending it to a possible anthology. Maybe your idea could work as a short too.
Thanks for sharing this with your students!
This blog post aptly describes my 1st vanity published novel that caused almost irreversible career suicide. Took me many many years to recover from that stain on my reputation.
Now I do thinks smartly and dabble in genes I like about topics that I like and haven’t been worked to death.
GB–You’re not the only one who vanity published a “practice novel.” I know dozens. Mostly authors who didn’t know the difference between vanity and self-publishing.
Sometimes we learn the hard way. But those lessons are not forgotten. Sounds like you’re doing it right now.
Thanks for more great advice. It’s so true that sometimes we just have to move on. For some time now I’ve been referring to my first novel-length manuscript as a Fine Writing Exercise. And there is always another possibility around the corner…
CS–I love calling it a “Fine Writing Exercise.” That’s often exactly what our first novels are.
This has happen to me as well, Anne. But like yourself, I’m glad it happened because the act of working on that project sharpened my skills. And I was also able to use some of the material in other projects. I’m of the firm belief that no time spent writing is a waste.
Leanne–I agree that no time spent writing is wasted. That first novel is “writing school” and we benefit a lot from it even if it’s never published. I think most first novels never see the light of day, but they teach us in many ways.
Great advice! I have several “completed” novels that I have put aside. I think that I may revisit them someday. One has been calling to me even though I know it needs a lot of work. We do have to know it is okay to put things that aren’t working out of our minds, hearts, and time. Gee, that kind of works for more than writing!
Christine–I think when we really get to know a character, it’s hard to let go. Sometimes you can give them a story or put them in another novel to let them have life, even when the first book didn’t work.
Yeah–giving things a rest is good in a lot of aspects of life. 🙂
I think I have a slow learning curve. Abandoned novel #1 was a sweeping historical drama with strong political and romantic elements that followed 3 generations of my 2 MCs. (I’m exhausted just reading the description.)
Novel #2 was a contemporary 200k (yep, count ’em) monstrosity that went wrong in so many ways. *sigh* I now have a cleaner, meaner, and leaner plan for the characters I am keeping.
But I’m shelving it for now to work on my newest idea, conscientiously applying what I’ve learned. Hard knocks can be good knocks.
Dominique– I tried one of those sweeping historicals. Luckily it didn’t get much beyond the brainstorming stage. But they’re seductive. And really tough to do well.
Keeping the characters from a stalled novel is a great idea. As I said to Christine above, it can be hard to let go of characters. They become our friends. So if you can transfer them to another, more viable storyline, that’s great.
“Hard knocks can be good knocks”…so true!
Please write The Yessydo.
Icy–Haha! 🙂
I was just about to comment that I’d totally read that. LOL
All good advice. By all means but aside the WIP – but never ever destroy/delete it. Returning to it later is always an option. I wrote a novel in 1974, it was praised by a publisher but then they turned it down; I left it to languish and went on to other work (and a different genre!) and got my first book published in 2007… I returned to that old novel, updated it, vastly improved it thanks to age/experience and it was published in 2008 and two sequels have followed! (I have now had 30 books published).
Nik–Congrats on all your writing success! I agree that you should never destroy an abandoned book. It can always be mined later for stories and characters, and maybe even rewritten from a more mature perspective as you did!
Note to the webmaster: I just tried to leave a comment by signing in via Twitter. I did log in and it showed my Twitter profile picture, but I got an ‘invalid signature’ error when I pressed ‘Post Comment’. So here is attempt 2:
I’m currently in the middle of something that I know isn’t terribly marketable, but I wanted to write it anyway, even if it only finds a small audience. But two of my characters ended up having better chemistry than the ones I intended and I’d really like to quit.
But Steven King almost quit Carrie and only continued because his wife pulled the beginning of his manuscript out of the trash.
Lex–The WordPress elves are certainly cranky this morning. They just shut me out too, and ate my comment to Nik. I had to sign in again through another link and when they did, they said I was a new commenter. On my own blog. Sigh. I don’t know why, but Monday mornings are always iffy with comments. There’s supposed to be a big WordPress update that will fix a lot of these problems, but so far, we haven’t seen it.
King’s mistake was putting Carrie in the trash. Never do that. But it is okay to take a break and write something else. That improves your skills and gives you perspective so you can tackle that big old WIP again.
Over a year ago I wrote a one act play I was going to produce at the local community TV station, but there was a flaw with the script and I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I pulled the plug on it. The reason I put aside was because of reason 1 on this list, and possibly reason 3.
I never thought I’d return to the play, but late last December I suddenly figured out what I had to do to improve the script and get it rolling again. Now I have a complete cast and I’ll start rehearsing soon.
So listening to my instincts and putting the project aside ended up working out.
Robert–Isn’t it amazing how a WIP can be improved after a little nap. Sometimes you need to take the nap and sometimes it’s the WIP. What a great, positive story!
Thank you, Anne!
Truth hurts sometimes Anne, but you are so right – there comes a time we must give some of our work a burial. But just as you said, and I have also done – there are nuggets left to mine through to use in other works. 🙂
Debby–It does hurt. I had a lot of pain leaving that novel behind. But I’m so glad I did!
I have several stories like that which I don’t want to stop writing… It will come sooner or later… That’s what I used to think, but it never came and I was left in the entry way looking for its return. Two I set aside for a while and rewrote it from a different perspective and it worked!. My problem is which story do I want to work on and complete to finish, when I do find one that is working well, how can I stick with it until the end…. I am working on moving all of my writing projects that I am not working on aside and in another folder so I don’t even see it hoping that helps. .
Debra–Sometimes it is really hard to focus on one piece. I know some writers who actually do best when they’re hopping from one project to another. Maybe you could choose two or three, then put the rest in your “to deal with later” folder.
Anne, I quite agree. I am working on two stories now and editing another that are working quite well. I am going to move everything to my file cabinet and place them in my document folder until they are done, and bata readers have looked it over. Thanks
Anne, I think your advice about memoir could be a literal life-saver for some people–if they take it.
Where, oh where, are the short stories and essays that came out of your closeted novel??? I want to read them!
Maybe if a writer has a really hard time saying goodbye, whether temporarily or permanently, to some characters, it would help to write an obituary for them. It could be lighthearted or melodramatic or something else, but it might help the writer move on. It could even provide the seeds for the short stories, etc., that you mentioned might spring from the abandoned work.
Tricia—Brilliant! I love the idea of writing an obit for a character.
You can read some of the stories I gleaned from that book in my story and verse collection, WHY GRANDMA BOUGHT THAT CAR. Only 99c for the ebook and there’s an audiobook, too. https://amzn.to/2EhHKu9
Full disclosure on the last idea above: It was inspired by a book I read recently in which the protagonist was interested in obituaries.
Tricia–It’s still your idea, and it’s a great one. Sue McGinty is a mystery writer whose sleuth is an obituary writer. It’s a great plot device.
I have one WIP I’ve just started on, and one waiting in the wings. I write quickly ~ 3 months for 1st draft, 3 for redrafts. The current WIP is Book 4 of a series I’ve written that’s selling fairly well. The second idea is a stand alone psych drama that I am sure will appeal to far more people than Book 4 of the series, which has a market comprising only of the people who’ve read the rest of the series.
The trouble is that I really, really want to write this Book 4. Sometimes, I think you have to write the book you want to write, regardless of how well it will sell. A psych drama’s time will never be over… it can wait! But generally, yes, I agree with all you say, and nd one thing I notice with debut novels is, yes, the temptation to pack everything in to appeal to everyone. Not all novels need a romantic thread/sex scenes/a bit of paranormal thrown in/the Russian mafia!
Terry–You’re farther along in your career than the writers I’m addressing with this post. I intended this for those writers who’ve been working on one book for a long time (often one over-stuffed with all those ptot devices you mention.) But they need to get on with their careers.
Your dilemma is one we all face. Most writers have more ideas than we have time for. So we always have to make these choices. My publisher wants me to write more nonfiction, because that’s what sells, but I love writing fiction so I alternate.
Accepted wisdom says that series sell better than stand-alones, but a series doesn’t usually get real ltraction until book 5 or 6. Based on that–and your passion for the story, I’d say Book 4 should be first in line. Then work on the stand-alone during the lulls, if there are any. But if you can write book 4 in 3 months, then you can rest easy knowing the psych thriller will be waiting for you when that’s done.
LOL! I’ve seen books offered on Bookbub that have so many genre descriptors it’s hilarious, things along the lines of “Tropical Siberian shape-shifter apocalyptic steampunk Pride and Prejudice variation!”
Why will book 4 only be interesting for those who have read 1-3, Terry? They’re not stand-alones?
Tricia–That’s hilarious! Actually a steampunk Pride and Prejudice variation might sell really well. You might have to try it. (Probably not set in the Siberian tropics, though. 🙂 )
This was some good advice. I’m struggling a little with a current WIP (first draft just finished). I think it still has potential but my heart just isn’t in it right now.
Perhaps time to set it aside and start working on the things that excite me. I guess I can come back to it later….
Thank you for the advice.
Poppy–It’s actually a good idea to let any first draft take a little nap before you tackle revisions. Even if you love it. So I’d certainly say it’s wise to give that ms. a little time out and work on something that you feel more passionate about. Check it in a month or so and see if you can get back that lovin’ feeling
I’m so glad someone had the courage to say this. I’m sure the funeral was also a relief. Attachment can be a death sentence 🙂
Tina–I think some authors just need permission from somebody they respect to let go. They think they’re “quitting.”
True, Anne. The inner child remains with us throughout life…
I am one of those authors who needs permission to let go! In 2007 I wrote a novel, and in 2009 and then again in 2013 (all for various university degrees) and at least twice a year I get the urge to rewrite one of them – because THIS TIME I know I can make it work. These novels are haunting me! I’ve tried rewritting them in so many different ways and they still don’t have a fixed premise (unfortunately in uni no tutor ever mentioned premise so the novels didn’t have a solid foundation). I love my characters and their stories but if I’m truthful there are elements of myself in them… The time ‘wasted’ on these novels got me qualifications and the qualifications got me a job and now I work as an editor (ironic?). I know how to help others to write books yet I can’t get a grip on my own and this fact embarrasses me. I’ve just felt the urge to rewrite my 2007 manuscript but looked up articles on ‘quittting’ instead. Will these old ‘works in constant progress’ haunt me forever? Please will someone help me move on? 🙂
Lynda–You provide more evidence that university creative writing programs don’t train people to be professional writers. But no time spent writing is wasted, and besides getting your university degrees, you know a whole lot more about how to write than anybody who hasn’t written three novels. I personally had to shelve at least five failed novels before I wrote one that could be published. One thing that helped me was writing short stories about characters in my failed novels. I even won an award with one. But the best “cure” is a shiny new project. If some of your abandoned characters happen to wander into your new book, that’s even better!