: Re: How do you know when to give up on a writing project? Writing is rewriting. The first draft of a novel is commonly riddled with mistakes: the beginning doesn't grip, the characters aren't consistent,

@Murray165

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I am not much of a writer, these days anyways. I had written a story which got to 90,000 words under draft two and a half. At that point a few friends had a skim over it and they liked it (to the point one was outraged when I told him I was abandoning it).

I put it aside for a while and would come back to it later, but a few months later I simply decided to abandon it and start plotting a new one.

The most important issue was that this was no longer the story I wanted to tell. It wasn't anxiety about any particular element being unpolished, it was that there were too many things which were fundamentally wrong. The whole thing would need rewritten to the point it would be a completely different story. What's the point rewriting everything to fit a new idea when you could just start writing a new story from scratch?

Only you will know if you still want to write this story. There's anecdotes of some authors who go to the trouble of doing fifty or so drafts of the same story to perfect their vision. But that's not the same as feeling like you've just moved on. That the core of the story is wrong, the messages implied from the text are wrong, that you could write better characters in more interesting environments to present deeper and more mature ideas.

You'll either know you want to write it, or know you don't. If you're feeling somewhere between, put it aside for a few months and see how you feel.

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