: 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,

@Phylliss352

Vote Up Vote Down

I think you (and others?) are thinking it too complex. It does not actually make any difference what the issues with your work are. Or rather it does but you can ignore it since you are only interested with the effect on your productivity and you can see that directly without thinking about the complex stuff.

Basically, the skill you need to develop is the ability to critically assess how productive your day of work was. How much did you improve your story towards publication or other goal you have for it? Did you make real progress towards fixing any issues? Did you build a good basis for further work?

Then you simply need to decide whether the productivity was good enough. Easiest way to do that is to have some point of comparison. Work on more than one project at a time and compare their progress. Whenever you are happy with the progress continue, otherwise switch. If a project fails to progress for several times in a row put it in a backburner and start something new or try taking an old project from backburner. Same with completing a project.

The goal is always to either be productively working on something or looking for productive work. You could for example dedicate some time in the morning on deciding what you can work productively on the day and then use the rest of the day on productive work.

If you are uncomfortable with switching projects because you are committed to a deadline or are simply bad at switching gears you can simply divide your current project into smaller parts and work on those separately. This can be problematic with a story and probably not worth it if work is already progressing well. But if you are stuck anyway, finding the parts, however small, that you like and are comfortable working with and expanding on can have value. You can produce lots of text that is useless for the final work but it will still help clarify your thinking and help work around the issues.

And, of course, if you cannot find a part of the story (or setting or characters) that you really like and want to expand on regardless of whether it helps your actual project, that kind of answers your actual question.

(0)

Login to post a comment!