5 Times Everyone Wants to Quit Their Novel

By Josiah DeGraaf

Us writers can be a moody bunch at times.  And so, in the process of writing a novel, there are several points in it when we’ll just want to give up and quit.  For whatever the reason, the story just isn’t working anymore.  Perhaps it’s the plot-holes that are making our story look more like Swiss cheese than anything else.  Perhaps it’s the roadblocks that our characters keep running up against.  Or perhaps it’s that it just isn’t that good anymore.  Glorified kindling at its best.

What do you do when you arrive at this point in your story?  Do you do what you’re actively considering and trash it?  Or do you ignore your feelings, press on, and write until you fall in love with your story again?

The short answer?  It’s complicated.  A lot of the time, our feelings can be deceptive, and the best course of action really is to keep writing.  But our feelings can also be right: sometimes a story really does need to be scrapped in exchange for another.

The key is to hold our feelings alongside reason and use them alongside each other.  There are many possible places when the temptation to scrap your novel and start something else will raise its ugly head, but in my experience, there are five main places where it tends to do so.

Let’s look at them and see what sorts of questions we ought to be asking ourselves to determine whether or not we should give into our feelings and quit the novel.

1. The 10% Mark

In some aspects, beginning a new novel can be a bit like beginning a marriage.  You already have a perfect idea for how the novel should start, your main character is brilliant, and writing prose has never been easier.  And then you hit the five or ten percentage mark and the honeymoon stage is done.  The newness of everything is over.  And the creative spark that you began your novel with is over.  You don’t think your novel has that much promise anymore.

So what do you do about it?

A lot of the time, I think we do need to realize that this is just natural for writers.  Few books will be a complete breeze to get through.  Writing is work.  And work isn’t always fun.  And so, in order to be a writer, you do just need to be able to write even when the fiery spark is gone.

That being said, sometimes there are legitimate reasons to end the book here.  Perhaps after writing this much of it, it’s become clear that the plot really is too sparse for a full novel, and is really only good enough for a short story, or maybe a novella.  Perhaps it’s just become really obvious that it’s just clichéd.

Unlike a marriage, a book doesn’t need to be held onto no matter what.  There’s no vow you gave when you began the book.  If there really are serious problems with it, then you may want to restart from scratch or perhaps scrap it entirely.  But make sure before doing so that it isn’t just a lack of zeal that is keeping you from writing.

2. The 40% Mark

At this point in your novel, you’ve plowed through the setup and are well into the thick of things.  You may know where you’ve been and where you want to be…  But you suddenly realize you have no idea how to get there.  You’ve run into the problem that many have called the “sagging middle”—where a novel has a strong beginning and a strong end, but the middle just has no clue what it’s doing.  You’ve lost sight of what you’re doing, and have run into multiple roadblocks.  Maybe you have writer’s block.  And you suddenly have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing with your book.

Again, often the best route is to just press on.  Take a break from the story for a bit, recalibrate yourself to why you loved this story in the first place, and prep up—but then plow into the story once again.  This middle section can often be the hardest part and the mark of a good writer is the ability to continue on even when they’re going through difficult portions of their book.

But sometimes a roadblock here means that you need to completely re-conceptualize the middle portion of your story.  Maybe you need to step back from your story and actually come up with a detailed plan for what this section will be like.  Figure out exactly how your character is going to work toward his goal and what roadblocks he’s going to run into in the process.  Perhaps delete a couple thousand words and start over on a new path.

The middle of your book can be the hardest point to write.  But that doesn’t mean you should stop here.

3. The 100% Mark

This may initially catch you off-guard—after all—the book is done!  You’ve written through the whole thing, you’re on a writer’s high for finishing the manuscript, and nothing could be looking better.  But then three or four weeks after you finish, you begin reading through your story and begin to notice all its major and minor problems.  And pretty soon, you’re convinced that your book isn’t any good.  Before, you could always tell yourself that your book just wasn’t finished yet, and all the problems would be fixed once the book was finished.  But it’s harder to say that when you’re looking at a finished product.

Here, however, I find that the answer is generally simpler than the earlier answers. That answer is revision.  Any first draft you write is bound to have problems in it.  Lots of them in fact.  And so the problems you see in it shouldn’t give you a sense of despair, but rather a sense of direction.  After all—if you’re not seeing problems in your first draft, then you’re probably doing something wrong.  Even experienced writers will go through several drafts in order to create the finished product that they’re known for.  So look at your novel’s problems, make a list of them, and begin your revisions.

4. The Editing Stage

Editing can have a tendency to be the most loathed part of writing.  After all, you’re spending all your time finding out where your writing is terrible and trying to figure out how to make it less terrible.  But it also has the potential to be the best part.  As hard as it can be, I’ve personally found that there are fewer things as exhilarating as looking at a newer and an older draft of a novel or a chapter and seeing how much I’ve improved my story.

But when you’re in the midst of it, it’s a lot more difficult.  You keep uncovering character and plot inconsistencies that are difficult to solve.  You aren’t discovering new aspects of your story.  Sometimes, it can get really menial.  And sometimes, you can find problems in your story that really are massive enough that you do need to call it quits and put the novel to rest.

But again, as with the last stage, I’ve found that often the solution here is not to give up, but to acknowledge that writing is just hard and to press on.  Editing is a process.  And so it takes a while to take your novel from where it is, look at where your novel can be, and work to get it to that point.  It isn’t very fun.  It isn’t very easy.  But it can be very rewarding.

5. The Completed Stage

Aka, the point when your novel is finally done.  You’ve written the whole thing.  You’ve edited the whole thing multiple times.  And any changes that you could be making to the story really are only making it a different story, and not necessarily any better.  But maybe you’ve gone through the full process, and have only come to a fuller realization that, as great of a learning experience as it has been, it’s time to move on.  Maybe you’ve come to this realization on your own.  Maybe you’ve tried the publication route and merely received a lot of rejection letters.

This point is tricky, because especially for younger writers, some level of experience with the craft comes with age and it often can be time to move on.  But it’s also true that at its core, writing is about perseverance.  Look up stories about how many rejection letters famous authors like John Grisham, Agatha Christy, and L.M. Montgomery received, along with others.  Sometimes a story needs to be put to rest and a new one begun.  But be careful that impatience isn’t keeping you from the goal.

So there are the five points where you’ll probably be most tempted to give up on your book.  And the tricky part? There aren’t many simple answers.  As I’ve pointed out, some points are more likely to be false indicators than others, but not every novel is going to be publishable.  And that’s the hard truth that we sometimes have to face.

Personally?  I’ve had several books that have died out at the 10% mark.  Two novels I wrote about thirty thousand words of before deciding to give them up for various reasons.  One novel I got halfway through the editing stage when I realized that I just wasn’t familiar enough with the genre of that novel to write a great story.  And currently I’m debating whether or not the novel I’ve just finished writing and editing is one that I should continue to pursue, or simply lay it to rest at stage five.

The harder truth that we’ll have to acknowledge?  Until or unless we get published, every novel we write is going to hit the dust at one of these five stages.  Unless you’re just primarily writing the novel for yourself and aren’t interested in becoming a published author, until your books are in print, your writing life will likely be an entire series of books that have died off at different points in this process.  It can become rather depressing when you think of it this way.  And when you think of all the novels you’ve begun and ended, you can begin to question why you’re even writing in the first place.

But through each book we write, we learn something new.  Each time we sit down and write, we get a little better.  Each novel ought to be an improvement from the last one.  And even if a trail of discarded novels follows us, we’re learning how to become better writers.  Perseverance as a writer doesn’t just mean persevering with a book until it’s through, although it does mean that.  It perhaps primarily means persevering with writing until we actually get good at it.

It may not be obvious in the moment, but go through the files of your computer, pull up something that you wrote five years ago, and begin reading.  I guarantee you that you’ll be shocked and will begin to wonder about how you could ever write so badly.  You recognize it because you’ve grown.  Because through incremental steps day after day and year after year, you’re a better writer now than you then.  And yes, your writing back then may be laughably bad.  But if you realize that, you’ve grown as a writer.

So what do you do when you want to quit your novel?  Assess where your novel is at.  Pinpoint the problems with it and check how fixable they are.  Consider the fact that writing is about perseverance and perhaps you just need to persevere with your writing.  But even if you need to lay a novel to rest, never view your work on it as a waste.  It may not be published.  But you’ve learned from it.  And through the process of writing it, you’ve become a better writer.  So keep at it.  Persevere at writing.  And through perseverance and growth, you’ll eventually find success.