When It’s Time to Move On and Abandon Your Novel

Leonardo Da Vinci said,“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

This is true for every short story I ever wrote, whether it was published or not. The published pieces, upon subsequent reading months or years after the fact, reveal things I would change today. And the rest – many, many of them – either failed to find a home, or I wasn’t able to finish them for a number of reasons, usually that I’d lost faith in the central premise the plot was built around and preferred to work on something new.

It’s one thing to give up on a story, and a very different thing to give up on a novel. A novel can take a long time to write, usually at least a year. That’s a lot of time to have nothing come of it. However, I do believe that any time spent writing is worth it, regardless of the outcome, especially if you learn more not only about writing, but about yourself as a writer.

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Tune in to The Official Prose. Blog later today for the full article by author and guest blogger Anne Leigh Parrish at: blog.theprose.com/blog.