Sometimes, You Just Have to Start Over

 

Photo Credit: Marta Nogueira at Pexels

 

Writers tend to invest a lot of time and hard work into their projects. They’ll spend hours and days working on that article, short story, or book, even if it seems to be going nowhere.

 

Writers tend to be stubborn, so when it comes to something they are writing that appears to be impossible or useless to write, they’ll roll up their sleeves and give it their best effort. They actually LIKE the idea of something appearing to be impossible to write, because then they can say that THEY wrote it. THEY got the job done.

 

So it’s understandable that, when upon realizing that it’s time to abandon a project, the writer will have a hard time doing so. They just DON’T want to give up on it. Not yet, anyway.

 

That was my situation this week. And for me, abandoning the writing project I was spending ALL of that time working on was an easy thing to do – because I have deadlines to meet!

 

I have been spending time this month working on two different articles for two publications. One of them is for my column writing gig. With both articles, I really had a hard time getting them written.

 

With one article, I couldn’t find sufficient information to make the article work.

 

For the other article, I couldn’t figure out the slant. I knew WHAT I wanted to write about, but I had to figure out HOW to write about it.

 

So I spent a lot of time this month trying to make those articles work. I kept up with my research and looked into other articles on this topic.

 

But all of that just wasn’t really going anywhere, and as my deadlines got closer, I knew I had to make a choice: Either keep up with it or ditch them and try something else.

 

In the end, I decided to ditch both articles. I didn’t delete them, because maybe I would have better luck with them later, but I decided that it was time to change things up a bit in order for me to turn my articles in on time.

 

My solution: Change the topic. I did this for both articles and immediately got to work on them (again!) with the focus on these new topics. Fortunately, these efforts have been more successful.

 

As to those articles I ditched, I figured that maybe the one that I could not get enough information for just needed to sit for a while. Maybe I will come across that information at a later time. There are always new publications popping up! With the other one, I decided on a slant for it, BUT that particular slant will require some time and money. I can just work on this article at leisure and send it to a different publication that I do not have deadlines with whenever it is ready.

 

This was not the first time I have had to abandon a writing project and start over again. I have had to do this with poems, short stories, essays, and even whole books. In fact, my novels Shadow of Samhain and Faded Reflection were rewritten several times before I felt they were “just right” and sent them out. With a short story that reached a dead end, I decided that since the deadline for my submission was fast approaching, I needed to put that one on hold and write a different story entirely for that particular anthology.

 

If a writer is struggling with a WIP, one of the solutions to getting out of that struggle is to just put it away for a while. Another solution is to abandon it entirely and start over.

 

Starting from the beginning really isn’t so bad. It may seem frustrating to have to start over, especially after investing so much time and effort into trying to write or revise something, but if the current method to get the job done isn’t working, starting over is usually the best thing to do.

 

Sometimes, abandoning a project and starting over again is just the thing needed in order to be successful with that attempt to write the thing the writer was unable to write before. A fresh start can offer a fresh perspective and new ideas, so consider giving it a try the next time you are struggling to write or revise your work-in-progress.