Running away from one story and into another

Last year I started writing a book. I did the research, I did the planning, I dreamed up the characters and gave some thought to the themes and what I wanted to say. I started to write. I realised I hadn’t planned as well as I thought, and that the power dynamic between the two leads wasn’t what I wanted. I re-thought, re-wrote. I shared some early chapters with my writing group, who gave positive feedback. Great. I wrote on.

It was a struggle, but who said writing was easy? The struggle is part of the process, right? The struggle is what’ll make it good.

Then, I started to hate it.

So far, so normal. It’s common for authors to go through a phase of thinking their current book is the worst thing ever written. Top tip: It’s not.

Show up, do the work. It’ll be fine.

I doubled-down. I went on a writing break with a friend and pushed on with 2,000 words a day. No going back and tinkering, just getting the story down.

I came home and read over my 50,000 word draft. Not finished, but more than half way.

Parts of it were good. There were some nice lines. Parts of it needed work.

But the story felt hackneyed. I liked one of the main characters, but the other just annoyed me. He’d made some bad mistakes and was about to make another. That’s OK. That’s good! People like flawed characters. But the plot bored me too. The magic felt too similar to the magic in my last book. That might not have bored readers, but it certainly bored me. I wrote a sex scene and just didn’t believe in it. I wanted to scream at the ‘good’ lead character to get out of this terrible relationship – he could do so much better! At some fundamental level I felt I was lying to the reader.

Now I REALLY wanted to stop writing the story.

But, as we’ve established, most writers, at some point, want to stop writing their story.

So, how does one distinguish between ‘this is hard and I don’t want to do the work’ and ‘this really isn’t working and that’s why it’s making me so miserable’?

I don’t know about you, but my way of distinguishing is to force myself to work on the story until I hate writing and hate everything and want to run away from the written word and can’t even read other people’s books. And then I stick at that, for several months, because writing is hard and I’m not a quitter. Aha ha.

But, eventually, I did run away. It wasn’t a simple decision, more a series of decisions, like trying to break a habit. But every time I went back, I realised I didn’t WANT to tell that story. If I’d finished it, published it, maybe some people would have liked it. But I thought it was sub-par and I’m allowed to stop. So there.

I wish I was smarter/faster at making these decisions. I walked away from another book a few years back and that was a similar nightmare of struggling and refusing to give up and returning to this floundering blob of a manuscript again and again and again.

I think what it comes down to is feeling. I have to feel that a story is right or I can’t make myself write it. It’s totally subjective and has nothing to do with anyone else. I’m also a harsh critic of my own work so that makes it extra difficult. Is it REALLY bad, or am I just being mean to myself?

Whatever, I’ve started something new. So far, it’s going quite well, I think. I’m having fun with it. I know what happens next. I like the way the magic works (or doesn’t work). The main characters have problems that interest me.

Will the new story, ultimately, ‘work’? Will it hang together and say what I want it to say and elicit the emotional response I want it to elicit? Will it be publishable? I have no clue. But I’m writing again, and I can read again, and so I’m calling that a win.

How do you distinguish between a manuscript that just needs more work and one that it’s better to walk away from?