You are sitting in the zone either banging away at the keyboard, keystrokes coming like bolts of lightning or your pen is flinging ink across the pages. All of a sudden, out of the blue, you hit a brick wall. Something doesn’t feel right. Your protagonist doesn’t feel real. There is no emotional connection. It’s like looking at a two-dimensional stick figure. Not to mention that your antagonist has no true motive and is being mean just for meanness’ sake.
As you go back and read over what you have just written to see how you can fix it, you come to realize your world is all black and white. There is no depth. You have no sound, no smell. The rain is just plain water. The wind blows yet the trees don’t shake and bend in the storm’s onslaught. And then there is the real root of the problem. The pacing is choppy and the plot is going off on a tangent. The writing is worthless and since you are the one that wrote it that means you are a worthless writer. Might as well give it all up and put in that application at that fast food joint.
Now is the time to slam on the breaks and come to a dead stop. We need to get one thing perfectly clear. You are not a worthless writer. Every single writer at some point in their life will write crap. It’s not the lack of skill, you know the workings of the English language, you know the difference between a noun and a pronoun. It’s not through a lack of creativity, you have written some good prose before. So what could it be? Very simply, it may just not be a fit for you. Maybe at this time, it is just too big for you. There have been times in my writing that the horror story I’m trying to portray just isn’t scary. The atmosphere isn’t right, the baddie just isn’t truly terrifying. A kids Halloween haunted house is scarier than the one I just wrote. That doesn’t mean that I’m a bad writer, it just means that the story is lame.
The ideas for a story you have in your head seem to be a great idea but when it’s put on paper, it just isn’t awesome anymore. All it means is that it just won’t work. So what do you do? You just throw it away and move on. I was 12,000 words in into a novel and it hit me that it just wasn’t working. None of it seemed not only not real but nowhere even plausible. There was no way in hell that belief could be suspended. You know what I did? I tore up all twelve thousand words and threw it all in the trash and moved on to the next project. For years I wanted to write an Epic Fantasy. I have tried several times. I’d build the world system, have everything in place including maps, and start to write and after about four to five chapters in I just couldn’t do it.
My world system would fall apart, I would find issues with conflicting belief systems, and pacing would be way off. After several new attempts, with all of them ending the same way, I came to an epiphany. It wasn’t me, it was that the project was just too big for me to attempt at that point in my writing. I didn’t know how to work around the plot. My writing skills were not developed for something on such a massive grand scale. I returned to writing horror. In the meantime, I went to sites such as Jane Friedman, Joanna Penn, and others and studied their advice. Over time, my skills advanced.
There is nothing wrong with looking at a piece of work and stating that I can not write this now. There is nothing wrong with tearing up what you have done and moving on to something else and putting this on a back burner to simmer. There is nothing wrong with giving up on writing as long as you are not giving up ON writing. Feel free to check out these links
www.janefriedman.com and www.thecreativepenn.com in these two places you will find a wealth of free information on every aspect of writing and publishing.