Friday, March 5, 2010

Knowing When It's Time To Quit

You’ve slaved over your novel for months, perhaps years. You’ve re-written it, polished it, and your beta readers have thrown in their comments.


What happens when it loses its luster? What happens when you read it and find it flat, boring, repetitious, even pretentious in places?

This commonly happens when you’ve cobbled pieces of your WIP together, re-written your characters so often you don’t recognize them anymore, and forgotten what the theme of your book really was when you began it.

And, you know what? It’s okay to throw it out the window, under the bed, box it up to recycle, or use it for compost.

Just because you’ve invested countless hours, days, and months of writing to a project/manuscript/WIP, doesn’t mean you can’t toss it.

Knowing when to quit and start a new story, that takes courage. Pounding away on a story that’s dead or dying fast is like killing yourself slowly with cigarettes. So, take the Nicotine challenge with your book and quit! You can start again, one word at a time, one page at a time. Your new story will take shape under your fingers and you’ll fast forget the clunker you just rejected. You’ll wonder why you ever spent so much time on it in the first place. And, that’s okay. It was time to quit.

3 comments:

shawn said...

Good advice. I have one that's shoved in a drawer under my desk. I keep telling myself that one day I'll go back and fix it. Not!!! It's just that bad. I think I'll take your advice. My rose bushes could use some compost.

shawn said...

Good advice. I have one that's shoved in a drawer under my desk. I keep telling myself that one day I'll go back and fix it. Not!!! It's just that bad. I think I'll take your advice. My rose bushes could use some compost.

Anonymous said...

SDear Laurie,
Thank you so very much for my "perfect score" on the Daphne. It made my day, week, month and year. As you know this writing business is not filled with kudos and to have you appreciate Grayce meant a great deal to me.
I've hesitated to post here but your email address failed and I really needed to express my gratitude. I truly appreciate your kind words and encouragement.
All my best,
Jacki Delecki - A Grayce Walters Mystery