Saying Goodbye to That WIP: When it’s Okay to Give Up on a Writing Project

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From 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.

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.

. . . .

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.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen

5 thoughts on “Saying Goodbye to That WIP: When it’s Okay to Give Up on a Writing Project”

  1. Market swings matter to those who write to the market.
    It’s one strategy, there are others.
    Some writers create their own market.
    Harder, but more stable.

  2. I’ve stuck with projects, not just writing projects, far longer than I wanted to and been glad I did. And I’ve stuck with projects and in retrospect, wished I hadn’t. And I’ve abandoned projects that I wish I had stuck with them.

    My working rule now is to stick with a project until I am sure I have gotten all I want out of it. Sometimes that means abandoning the start of a novel after a few thousand words, even a few drafts. Sometimes it means sticking with a project I really hate because I know there is still something there for me.

    In the end, it’s what satisfies me, which has changed greatly over the years.

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