A bit of a downer topic today, sorry, but hey, it’s 2020 and this might be a thing that’s happening to you this year. Fear not, it’s not all doom and gloom—good things can still come out of having to give up on a story, promise.
I think most writers usually hit a point in their writing process where they think “OMG, this sucks, it sucks forever, this can’t get any better.” And then they keep writing, and then ingenuity kicks in and they get it back on track. These are just the natural ups and downs of writing and are totally normal.
If, however, writing your way out doesn’t seem to work, whether it’s rewriting sections, reworking an outline, or reconsidering things from another angle, and you only seem to be writing yourself into a corner, it’s time to sit back, take stock, and figure out what’s really going on here.
Is it the plot? If you’re a plotter, have you maybe overwritten the outline and not given yourself enough room to play and let the story take you where it wants to go instead of where you’re trying to take it? If you’re a pantser, do you need to take some time to determine where the story is going? If you’re somewhere else along the plotter/pantser continuum, are you leaning one way or the other, and do you need to find balance between structure and play?
Is it the characters? Romance is so character-driven that your protagonists have to be compelling and relatable to your ideal reader. Notice I didn’t say “likeable”—they don’t have to be, but we have to understand why the love interests love each other, and we have to see how everyone in the relationship makes themselves worthy of their partner(s). If you’ve realized the love interest is an irredeemable asshole and that assholeness is baked into their character so much that even a massive rewrite won’t fix it, it might be time to call it on this one.
Is it you? Do you love the story you’re telling? Is it a story that you believe in and that means something to you? Or do you feel like you’re just going through the motions? Is the story frustrating you and making you doubt yourself (again, beyond the usual ebbs and flows of the writing process and imposter syndrome)? Are you enjoying the process, even despite any of the things that might be going on externally in your life? If not, why not? You can have a really difficult story that you wrestle with and that forces you try new things and get out of your comfort zone and feels like hell to write—if you feel like putting this story out into the world is still worth it, then you keep at it. But if it’s torturing you and you don’t love it, just stop. Put it aside and come back to it later to evaluate if it’s worth saving. If it still feels like it’s not going to be worth it and no amount of reworking will save it, consign it to the drawer.
Of course, scrapping a story may be much more challenging when you’re under contract for a book and under deadline, and that’s something you can work out with your agent and/or editor to make sure a book with your name on it is something that you’re proud of.
It’s also particularly tricky if this book is part of a series in which details about character and plot have already been established. Luckily, secondary characters early in the series who become primary characters later usually aren’t fully fleshed out in those early books, and you have room to play with them, reinvent their backstories, and maybe work with a brand-new character as their love interest who will be a perfect fit for whatever their difficult-to-write idiosyncrasies are.
Before you decide to throw in the towel completely on your story, don’t forget to ask for help! This is what betas, critique partners, and editors are for, to give you different perspectives that you may not have considered and to help you work out story difficulties. They might come up with something that puts the story in a whole new light and gets you going again.
And if you do have to scrap the story, that is OKAY. Nothing is ever truly a waste of time. I know it’s hard and awful to give up ten pages, a hundred pages, a whole book’s worth of writing, but think about all you learned while you wrote those pages—whether it was research that you did, a dynamic between characters that you explored, the writing streak you went on, the knowledge that you have now about how much you will put yourself through for a story and what your threshold is for that. All of these things are worth knowing. I came across this Twitter post while I was writing this, and June Hur's got it:
@WriterJunHur: Dear Writers, No manuscript you’ve had to shelve is ever a waste. Even if you never return to it again, this MS allowed you to amass 1000+ hours of writing experience, which is priceless. Sincerely, The Writer Who Took 8 Years to Let Go of Her First Manuscript
Not only can you use the experience, you can also mine this now-shelved manuscript for content, descriptions, ideas for your next stories. Put that really hot sex scene into the next book. Use the same outfit that a character wore into the new story. Try the same trope in a different context. Grab your best bits—the things you’re really proud of in the shelved MS—and put them in a new file to reuse in the future.
This isn’t all to say that you should instantly give up if a story isn’t working for you. Hell no! Work at it and try everything you can, but don’t berate yourself if it’s not working, and don’t berate yourself if you have to give it up. It’s better to do that rather than trying to force it into submission and putting out something you (and your readers) won’t enjoy.