Strategies for Success: Changing Projects

No matter whether you are a planner, pantser, plantser, no matter how much prep work you do or don’t do, there will come a time someday that you will discover that you hate your novel with the passion of a thousand firey suns.  Maybe not this year.  Maybe not for many, many years.  But it happens to everyone at some point, so it will happen to you someday.  Every word is painful.  Every line of dialogue is infuriating.  Maybe your characters are flat.  Maybe your plot just doesn’t work.  Maybe you took on something too big and now it seems overwhelming. Maybe you’re just bored with it.  Or maybe you just had a crummy idea and now are realizing it.  It’s all right.  It happens.

When it does, what do you do?  You could just keep writing, and hope that you get over the hump.  Sometimes all you have to do is power through.  Keep writing until you get an idea of how to salvage the mess.  People that are heavy duty planners might be well suited to this approach, especially if you just don’t feel comfortable trying to start from scratch on the fly.

But there is an other option for you.  You can scrap it all and start over.  I don’t mean throw your words away!  No no no!  Keep those words.  You wrote every one of them and you deserve every one of them in your count.  But you can put a nice lil page break in your file and start a new story.  If you get a sudden burst of inspiration for a story that is now bugging you in your head, and you want to write that instead, who’s to say you shouldn’t?  Nobody!  What’s wrong with doing some of your nano words on one story, and some on another?  Nothing!  I wouldn’t even call that rebelling, quite frankly.

So if you need a fresh idea to brighten up your enthusiasm and get those words flowing, go ahead and do it.  You might wind up with two stories that are worth telling.