I write poetry sporadically, and sometimes dabble with short story ideas. However, novel writing gets me.
I have started too many beginnings of novels to count. I think at least 4 made their way to YWS. Some of them only made it like 2 chapters, and some I've reached up to 20 chapters and past the 50,000 word count (NaNo '15 - yay!). However, after NaNo madness ends, or I drop out of LMS, I don't work on them much.
My main concern is with one of my longer starts on my novel, Blotted Out. It's not my longest, but it's probably one of my favorites. I'll sometimes just look back at my prologue and previous chapters and think "wow, I was actually going somewhere with this". But the more I wrote it, the less confident I felt. It started becoming cliche, and although I knew where I wanted to go with it, I didn't know how to get there. Then I panicked and added in this really stupid love triangle that was also super cliche, and it just made it worse. I'll pick it up after a year of not writing, and then set it back down again for another 4 months, and then try and write again, and it's all just really exhausting. Part of me wants to start a novel fresh, and part of me is screaming at me to keep working on Blotted Out.
So all of that to ask this: when is it time to scrap a novel idea? Or maybe a better question, when shouldn't you scrap an idea?
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