Writing Blog

20230728 Crash! Burn! Restart?

July 28, 2023, 1:00pm

It happens often enough for me to not be overly upset or angered or depressed by it, but I thought I could use this as something that might help others out there. In that vein, here goes.

My anthropodermic tome adult horror novel has just crashed and burned after 80 hand-written pages (c.30k words). After finishing the YA work the other day, I really hit it and wrote 7 new pages in a short period, but I realised I was not really developing anything substantial. It was going in circles, and the way I was trying to write it just was not working.

I looked through my 'Unfinished' folder, hoping to find a short story I could work on, and instead found another longer work which I'd finished 15k words on that just spoke to me, so I am now going through that.

What did I do with the old one? It's still there, and I could come back to it, rewrite everything I've done, and see if I should approach it from a different angle, but I need to forget what I've already done first. I do this so the old story does not keep trying to impose itself.

So, two things come out of this. Let's call this advice, as much as I hate giving advice: never throw anything away because you can always come back to it at a later time; and don't be afraid to let go if something is not working.

Hopefully, this will be of some help to someone somewhere.