It happens. Every novel I start begins in a surge of excitement and a sense of infinite possibilities. Then, as I work, those possibilities start to shrink down with every choice I make. Certain plot twists become impossible, certain characters prove to be less than fascinating and are phased out, certain ideas get pushed aside.
Along with those dwindling options in your story you also start to get a sense of whether or not the story is working. As much as writers are often poor judges of their own material and rely on other people’s feedback, we generally do have a handle on whether the book is even working on a fundamental level. There might be some serious denial going on, of course, but deep down you know. And sometimes you get the ominous feeling that this book you’ve been working on for six months, this book that now has tens of thousands of words in it simply isn’t working. You have a thing that looks like a book but is really a shambolic mess.
Or maybe that’s just me. When a novel that I’ve invested time and energy into starts slipping through my fingers like a castle made of sand, I don’t just give up, because I like to finish things—because you publish exactly zero of the projects you don’t finish. Instead, I try to come up with a solution to save the day.
Finish Him
My choice of solution varies depending on how far along I am.
Almost a Novel. If I’m three-fourths through the plot and the work is already or close to book-length, I just push through. Just because a novel is terrible is no reason to just not finish it—as long as you’re close to the end. If I think I just need a few more weeks to polish this turd into a novel-shaped thing, I go on and put that work in, because at least I’ll have a book at the end of it.
Halfway to a Novel. On the other hand, sometimes you realize that you’re writing something awful much earlier. If there’s a lot of work left to make this into a novel-length story, I’ll usually abandon that goal and focus instead on coming up with a resolution to the story that ties everything up in a much shorter time span. Better to have a novella than nothing at all.
A Complete Mess. If I’ve got a lot of words and not much else, I’ll lower my goals to simply extracting something from the pile. Maybe the first chapter—when I was inspired and focused—could work as a standalone short story. Maybe a middle section could work on its own. If there’s nothing worth pulling out then I’ve really screwed the pooch, because that means there’s literally no contiguous set of a few thousand words worth reading in the whole thing and I should reconsider my application to Clown College.
That last scenario almost never happens, though, because there’s almost always something worth saving. A few years ago I started work on a novel that’s been up and down quite a bit. I originally cut it off and Went Novella on it when the story lost steam, but then I went back and thought I had a solution to the book’s many problems. I doubled the word count and yes, it’s a novel now, but it still isn’t a good novel.
Still, I’d rather have a finished novella and novel out of it than a swamp of messy words. I may never publish either version of that story, but at least with finished, somewhat polished work the possibility of publishing it in some form remains.
Whether or not the world benefits from publishing those stories is an issue our future alien overlords will have to determine when they sift through the ashes of our culture.