When To Abandon Writing A Novel?

How do you know when a project isn't working?

Is it when a short story is short of an exciting lead character or a brilliant ending, or a gripping beginning, or all three?

Or is it when writing a novel turns out to be not quite so novel as you imagined it when you first thought of the idea?

Most writers have projects lying unfinished and abandoned in drawers like a shopping cart left in a multi-storey car park.

We hope they won't be there forever, rusting away, but right now we can't get them in the place they ought to be.

Maybe we'll pillage some of the best bits for other stories and get the hell out of there, feeling a little guilty about leaving a story we dedicated time and thinking to abandoned.

But how long do you flog the dead horse before you realise it will neigh no more?

I think it's all down to how much time you've invested in the project or, to use poker parlance, how pot committed you are.

If you've planned for months and written a whole draft or two, giving up that baby there and then isn't going to be easy. You're going to try and make it work, no matter what.

You may be tempted to get the script out there in the public eye for others to feed back on. Maybe it's not as bad as you think? It usually is.

For me, I seldom get as far as writing a first draft without knowing if this is a story with legs.

I'll spend a good couple of months planning out the story, hoping a spark might save it from the oblivion of unfinished-dom. Yearning for a plot twist to turn it on its head and save it from the dreaded Drawer Of The Poor.

If nothing happens during those months, I'll move onto something else.

But there's no escaping that feeling of failure, especially every time I go shopping and see those abandoned carts...