It’s a fair question. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and dedication. Some people will rush in to say “Nooo! Never give up!” But if you’re asking, it deserves consideration. Maybe that specific novel is something you’re ready to ditch; maybe it’s become an albatross around your neck. You don’t have to carry on if you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you a quitter.
Or maybe you’re having a standard creative crisis point, the ones every writer and creative gets, but you don’t know about those yet. And if you ditch this one, the next project will reach the same crisis points – precisely because they are standard.
It’s not a question I can answer for you. But I can pose the questions which will help you decide and I can tour you through the standard crisis points you might be having.
Is it an albatross?
When a student asks about downing tools on a particular story or novel, these are the questions I put to them, to help them work it out.
Do you still like the story?
This is the most important question. Not “Are you stuck on it?” or “Are you struggling with parts of it?” but “Do you like it?” If you’re going to spend evenings, weekends, even stolen bank holidays immersed in this story, you need to like it. You can still be frustrated at times, or stuck, or even despairing – all of those are valid creative crisis points. You can be all those and still actually like the story. Do you still like the story?
How long have you been working on it?
It’s not a bad thing to spend years working on a novel. It’s normal. It doesn’t even make you a slow writer, compared to the book-a-year writers, if they’re doing it full time. If the answer’s more than ten years, though, then the next question becomes pertinent. The reason it’s taking a while might be nothing to do with writing or the story: work, family responsibilities, health issues, etc, can all leave us with less time for writing. But once years have passed, it’s worth asking if you still relate to it.
Do you still relate to it?
The story a twenty year old came up with in 2001 might not be the story you want to write now. You wouldn’t take much of your younger self’s advice on fashion, finances, recipes, relationships; you’re not honour-bound to follow their story idea. Your concerns change shape as time passes: sometimes that idea, so cutting-edge to you at the time, looks a little threadbare to you now. To you is the pertinent phrase: many ideas and novels stand the test of decades. And some parts of your younger self will stay at the glowing core of you, as concerns and ideas you still care deeply about it. The question is simply, do you still relate to it?
Do you feel like you're not allowed to write anything else until you finish it?
The Never Quit Brigade can rule strongly in our heads. But that’s a nonsense. We’re allowed to stop doing things that don’t work for us anymore. Yes, by finishing stories you learn things that you don’t learn any other way, but it doesn’t have to be this story.
If you don’t like the story anymore, if you’ve been working on it so long that you don’t relate to it any more, and if you’re only carrying on so you can finish the damn thing and get to writing other stuff, you can stop. It’s okay. This is your permission. And now rises the spectre of…
But I’ve spent so much time on it!
That’s what we call the sunk-cost fallacy and that’s why the Never Quit Brigade is so dangerous. The sunk-cost fallacy is a standard-issue human bias: that once you’ve invested time, money, or effort in something, it’s a waste not to continue – even if it costs a lot more time, money, or effort; even if new evidence shows it’s not worth pursuing. It’s why businesses throw good money after bad, pushing a product that isn’t selling or doesn’t work. It’s one of the reasons people stay in unhappy relationships, loath to “throw away” five years, so they stay unhappy for another five, and then can’t bear to “throw away” ten… But the time, money, or effort is already spent. We have to decide afresh if we want to spend more.
A lot of the sunk-cost fallacy is an aversion to waste, so that’s a good way to unpick it, so you can decide afresh. Write down everything you’ve learnt from writing this novel so far: the craft of writing, your creative processes, your practical processes, the joys you had with it, the lot. Fill pages of your notebook with it. That’s a useful thing to do whether or not you continue with it.
That’s everything you’ve gained. None of that is wasted. And you’re now in a good position to decide if you want to keep writing this novel or use that experience on something else.
If, at this point, you do want to keep writing it, and are even quite cross with me for suggesting you stop, then it sounds like it’s not an albatross at all. You’ve likely hit a creative crisis point.
Standard Crisis Points of Creative Projects
Creative crisis points feel like dreadful immutable revelations when you hit them: stark and bitter truths. The floor vanishes from under you. The project dwindles to a vanishing black hole, a tiny terrible weight sucking everything in with it. But they’re not Truths. They’re like hiccups and they pass. I get them with every novel I write and with every course and workshop I create. I’ve learnt that other writers get them too. And with repeated experience, I’ve learnt not to think, “Oh no, the terrible thing is true” but “Oh, I’m at that point in the project, am I?”
So here are the most common, in the order in which they usually pop up. And for all of them, the solution, one way or another, is to carry on. Identify it as the standard stage it is, and carry on.
“I’m not good enough / It’s not good enough.”
Everything is messy, incomplete, and not good enough at the start, but it’s hard to remember that. We’re like bakers staring in despair at flour, sugar, and eggs, thinking, “This is a terrible cake.” Well, yeah. It’s not finished yet.
The same is true of us, as writers. If you show me pages of execrable prose and say “I should just stop, shouldn’t I?” I’ll just show you some of my own early-draft pages, and we can have a good laugh together. It’s not about the quality as it stands now, of the work or our own skill, because if we keep working on something, then we keep learning, improving it, and reshaping it.
In my teaching and my feedback, I see people’s writing develop all the time, from clunky first attempts to breathtaking prose, from clumsy drafts to stunning stories and novels. My own first drafts have got much worse, over the years, as I’ve learnt to thrash things out more freely. I know from experience that I can and will fix it later. With time and practice, you learn the skills to improve and reshape it, and you learn you will improve and reshape it. Keep on writing.
"I can't do this and in fact it can't be done."
“I should give up on this novel.” “I have to email everyone who’s booked onto this workshop, cancel it, and refund them.” This one strikes without fail, for me. I was delighted to discover Neil Gaiman writing about the same thing:
The last novel I wrote (it was Anansi Boys, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”
I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”
These days, when this happens, I pull out more felt-tips, more post-its, take myself somewhere else to work, and keep going – and it all magically becomes doable again. Keep on writing.
"I can summarise this in one sentence. Why on earth would I write a whole book?"
All that work paid off – and now I can articulate the heart of the book, everything I wanted to say with it, in one clear sentence. So why bother with a whole novel?! Just write a two-line poem on the novel’s theme, right? Nope. I’ve just zoomed out too far.
Astronauts talk about the “pale blue dot” experience, when they see the Earth floating in space, a fragile tiny pale blue dot. That total overview gives them a wholly new perspective on conflicts, the environment, everything. Telling someone about the pale blue dot doesn’t give them that experience, though. And all of those changes need to happen on the Earth, back where the continents are huge and all those billions of people are human-sized.
My one sentence is what I want the book to do; the sentence itself doesn’t do it. I need to go back down to Earth: back down into the detail, with all the events and living characters. When you zoom out so far, it becomes tiny. As you zoom back in, it will all get big again – even, if you’re an overwriter like me, too big! Keep on writing.
"This book is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed. I've written it wrong."
This often pops up near the end of a novel or at the end of a first draft. I’m having this crisis now, two chapters from the end. A month ago, someone in my writing group had it with her freshly completed first draft. In fact, her crisis was what inspired me to write down all the crisis points, and now I’m laughing and blushing to realise that the Terrible Truth about my current novel is, again, just another standard crisis point. This crisis means that there are some structural flaws, sure. And at the end, with a complete reread of the entire story, the fixes turn out to be quite easy and most of it is actually structurally sound. Keep on writing.
"This is the best thing I could ever write! I will never be able to write something of this quality again."
I used to get this with every other chapter, if not every other page, when I was trying to write perfectly as I went along. Now I get it at the end of each novel, when I’ve resolved those structural quibbles and polished my prose. It’s always tricky to go from polishing a diamond back into the mud pit of creativity – but that’s where your diamond came from. I have two strategies for this. One is “Write it now, judge it later.” The other is to go back to the first draft / early notes of the diamond I’ve just finished polishing and have a good laugh at how muddy and rough it was before I did all that work on it. And so we go round, back to the beginning. Keep on writing.
The creative crisis points are, alternately, terrible and funny. Terrible when you first encounter them. Increasingly funny when you start to identify them and they keep cycling round, always trying to pass themselves off as The Truth. Straight-up hilarious when you’re writing a blog post about them and realise the thing you were so Wise about a month ago is where you are right now. You learn to laugh, ruefully shaking your head, and they don’t stop you writing.
Keep On Writing
If your current novel’s become an albatross, you’re allowed to stop writing it. Stopping one thing means something else can begin. If you’ve simply hit a creative crisis point with your novel, carry on with it. But I am never going to suggest that you stop writing altogether. I mean, you can if you want – no-one’s obliged to sing, dance, draw, or write – but why stop doing something that brings so much joy? And it’s such a joy, even when plot holes are baffling us or we’re roller-coastering through creative crisis points. Keep on writing – but you don’t have to do it alone.
If you want fresh ideas for a new thing, or if you want to develop your current story, this August's Summer of Writing workshops will help. Characters Unlike You will set your storytelling free in so many ways. Planning a Novel will teach you the tricks of mapping out mist, capturing the ideas and organising a story that doesn’t yet exist. And Page Turners will give you the strong-as-a-mast narrative spine that will carry you and the reader through the story, plus all the ways the story plays out along that to keep the reader gripped. And after the summer, if you want to explore new possibilities or polish your diamond, the Writing in Style course will take you on new adventures in language.
If you’ve done any workshops or courses before (or do any this summer or autumn), you can also join the free monthly Writing Boost on the first Monday of every month: live online sessions to help you, motivate you, and keep you in community with your fellow writers. And you can join the online Community Group, to stay in touch with each other, and get the weekly Writing Skills to keep developing your writing and stay inspired.
Only you can say if you want to keep on writing your current novel or not: that’s your choice. But you’ve read all the way to the end of this, so I reckon we can say you definitely want to keep on writing. Keep on writing.
