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 do it, 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.
But don't throw it TOO far under the bed. Sometimes, later, there will be a lovely "aha" moment, and you'll realize all wasn't lost, after all!
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