Novel Writing: Should You Abandon a Bad Idea Halfway Through?

Though I love to write, and all I ever dreamed of as a kid was to write a best-selling novel, I’ve never really finished one before.  And what I mean to say by that is yes, I’ve started one, but left it halfway through.  Honestly, now that I think about it again, I don’t think I’ll ever get back the drive to write and finish it.

Yes, it was that bad.  And no, I didn’t think it was bad the moment I formed the plot in my head.  So when did I know it was bad?  When I let somebody else read it.  And then I read it myself and realized what trash I’d been wasting my time on.

I realized I wasn’t ready for a novel yet.  I probably still needed to learn some storytelling skills and write short stories for a start.  Maybe I needed to do things gradually than have them accomplished overnight — not as I would have wanted, but as how my readers would be more pleased.

I’m not going to elaborate further on how my novel sucked.  It’s torture enough as it is to think about it.  But the question remains:  Should we really dump a novel halfway through because it isn’t worth reading?  Is it right to leave an unfinished manuscript lying open and gathering dust and start a new one that we think might do us some good?

The truth is (I’ve learned this from a number of experienced writers other than myself), the process of finishing that first masterpiece takes  time.  It would take an average author tens, if not hundreds of crappy manuscripts –finished or unfinished– to smooth out the rough edges of his writing and eventually give birth to a perfected, organized, enthralling, captivating work of literature.

A bad idea of a novel can be settled in one of two ways:  either leave it alone and be rid of it, or keep patching it up until it becomes less intolerable.  Whichever works for you is the best solution.  Whichever one you think is a complete waste of time probably is.  But whichever option you think would help you hone your novel-writing skills, though it may be the more tedious one, would be the correct choice.

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