When is it time to put a project aside?

[Archon of Cringe]

For those of you who know, I joined this forum to get help on a Webnovel I want to write.
And I've been thinking of putting it down.
As much as I love its ideas and characters I've made, I realize I lack the skills to do it. Every time I try a new thing, I grow unhappy and stop. I've been stuck in a rut for months with no progress. I enjoy thinking about it more than writing it.
One time it's corny, another time, unoriginal.
But I still want to write it.
I don't know what to do. I'm certain I'm in a sunken cost fallacy, but at the same time, I feel something else is drawing me to it so I can bring it to life.
Maybe a novel is the wrong format for this kind of story. I don't know.

 

[pmmg]

The Journey is the reward. If you dont enjoy the journey, why be on it?

You wont become better at creating it solely by thinking about it. You need to actually do, and there is no way around actually doing it, rut or not.

If you just want it completed and dont want the hard part, hire a ghost writer.

 

[Archon of Cringe]

I know that too. But how do I know it's a good drive to get better versus a bad one that I need to prune.

 

[pmmg]

By moving along on the journey.

When one is at the beginning, the whole thing looks impossible. But as we move along we get better at being on it.

 

[ThinkerX]

For those of you who know, I joined this forum to get help on a Webnovel I want to write.
And I've been thinking of putting it down.
As much as I love its ideas and characters I've made, I realize I lack the skills to do it. Every time I try a new thing, I grow unhappy and stop. I've been stuck in a rut for months with no progress. I enjoy thinking about it more than writing it.
One time it's corny, another time, unoriginal.
But I still want to write it.
I don't know what to do. I'm certain I'm in a sunken cost fallacy, but at the same time, I feel something else is drawing me to it so I can bring it to life.
Maybe a novel is the wrong format for this kind of story. I don't know.

The only way to become a writer is to write.

Your case is fairly typical and does have a solution: Place a higher value on *completion* than *quality*. First drafts tend to suck. Let it suck. Instead, put down more words. Push on any way you can. In times past, I have taken an old cooking timer, set it to an hour and forced myself to write until the bell rang.

The other issue is having at least semi-solid notions of the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

Get that first draft done, let it sit for a time, then when you go back to it, most of the needed fixes will be obvious.

 

[TWErvin2]

Maybe put it aside and work on something else, with an eye toward developing skills you feel need improvement.

A thing to remember, however, is that you're writing a first draft. It is going to be flawed, and need revisions and edits. As you write the tale, your skills will improve, and also you'll get to know the story better.

Really, you're the only one who can say if it's better to set it aside for now, or not. If you do decide to set it aside, consider (if you have not created an outline) creating a file to jot down all of the relevant bits of plot and dialouge, description and ideas for characters and character growth. You may not come back to the project for a while, maybe years. And what is fresh now in your mind, may not be--especially after multiple projects have been worked on in between.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Perhaps consider a chapter to BE a completion. Sometimes people have an innate sense of something being off but not knowing what. Let it rest. A chapter/scene is, in a sense, a story all by itself. A beginning, a middle, and an end. If your chapters aren't doing their jobs, then the whole isn't either. Let that chapter (or 5-6 chapters) rest, read up on the craft—in particular check out books on writing written by editors—peruse pieces people submit to Critique Requests (published and professionally edited work is often trickier to find flaws in) on this forum and find what you like and dislike, go back and read your work with critical eyes. Rewrite or Edit. Rinse and repeat while working on a new chapter or two.

In the end, you never know if what you write will be enjoyed by other people, but if you put the time into it, you should be able to write something you enjoy.

 

[BearBear]

If it's not fun anymore, go back to doing the things you did before this. For me it was reading fanfics.

I take breaks too, if it's not fun and I'm not looking forward to it, it's time for a break.

About skill, don't worry about that, it'll improve.

 

[Archon of Cringe]

Everyone's advice is amazing, and I am grateful.

Here is the weird part.
It's fun thinking of the story and writing it. The issue is that whenever people give me negative feedback to the degree of "I don't understand what's going on" "I don't relate to the main character" or the most recent of the new triad "Unoriginal," it stops being fun.
I love these ideas, but I've been struggling to implement them in a way that is fun for me and able to get across what I want to the audience.

 

[BearBear]

Truthfully what you need is a soundingboard of friends who only say nice and constructive things. I can't say it would be easy or practical to get this but when I did I truly improved my abilities. Only when my skill was good did I show the normies and they liked it but never saw the cartoonish, stick-figure-like babbling that only the author could love.

 

[pmmg]

Everyone's advice is amazing, and I am grateful.

Here is the weird part.
It's fun thinking of the story and writing it. The issue is that whenever people give me negative feedback to the degree of "I don't understand what's going on" "I don't relate to the main character" or the most recent of the new triad "Unoriginal," it stops being fun.
I love these ideas, but I've been struggling to implement them in a way that is fun for me and able to get across what I want to the audience.

See rule 3, below.

You love it, that is enough.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Do or do not, there is not try...

I think the most important part is to realize that writing is a skill, and that you can only improve a skill by practicing it. No one is born a writer. Even the greatest out there started out mediocre. Compare it to playing a musical instrument. No one expects you to play perfect piano when you first sit down to play. And you only learn playing piano by sitting down and playing. So it is with writing. Many writers have remarked that the first 500.000 - 1 million words you write are your "yourneyman words", where you're just practicing your craft. You'll need to get through them to get good. Accept that, and just write. You'll never learn as much as when you complete that first novel.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can write the same story multiple times. And you don't even have to show the bad first attempt to anyone if you don't want to. I remember Dean Wesley Smith mentioning in a talk that he once had a great idea, and he wrote the story 3 times before he was happy with how he got the idea down on paper. So you can just write your story, put it aside, and write it again, better.

Also keep in mind that you can write multiple stories. This idea you have now doesn't have to be the only thing you write. So it doesn't have to be perfect. Just write the story, learn the craft, and then write a next story. I used to believe that I had 1 idea for a great saga, which made me hesitant to write it, since I would be wasting my amazing idea. Now I know that each time I write a story, I get ideas for 2 or 3 more. I have more stories in me than I can write, and the number only grows, not shrinks.

With all that said, if you want to write it, then sit down and write it. It's very common that it's hard to sit down and get to work. More people like having written than that they like writing. But there's only one way to get a story written, and that is to place your butt in a chair and your hands on a keyboard. It's work, and no one but you can do it.

 

[Finchbearer]

The way to become a writer isn’t only to write but to read, IMO, do you read? If not, pick up a paperback and get inspired.

 

[Penpilot]

I beat around the bush for many-many years, and only produced a couple of chapters to my first book. Kept rewriting those opening chapters not ever finding what I considered an original path to take. After listing to some writing podcast, I got a real idea of what it took to write, so I just said F it and leaned right into all the things I wanted to avoid. Cliche this. Unoriginal that. I ate it up and spit it out onto the page.

Then, a funny thing happened along the road of cliches. I started to come up with interesting things to hang onto that unoriginal framework. I came to realize originality is overrated, or rather the concern for being original is. It's actually just noise distracting you from the task at hand, simply finishing the story. Tell the story you want to tell. Nothing else matters.

For me, once I took that approach and attitude, that's when I started to finish things. When starting out, we have to learn sooo much, and the only way to learn is to do. Starting a story isn't enough. Getting halfway through isn't enough. You have to go through the whole creative process of coming up with the ideas, using the ideas in the story, and most important of all, taking the story from start to finish. If all you do is start and give up, all you ever learn to do is start and give up. You're going to make mistakes and F up big, but that's part of learning.

My first novel was a 275K mess, but I learned so much from just finishing it. And though the execution of it was awful, the basic idea of the story isn't. I may one day go back and rewrite the thing. I know how to do it better now. And I have ideas for sequels or side stories in that story world. But for now, its in the trunk as I do other things.

If you never finish anything, the best thing to do for yourself is to finish something no matter what. If you don't have trouble finishing, that's when you can shift focus and start worrying about other things. You can have the most original handful of chapters ever written, but if you never finish the story, what good are they? If you finish, you have something to work with and improve on. At the very least, you have something to learn from.

 

[Miles Lacey]

Everyone's advice is amazing, and I am grateful.

Here is the weird part.
It's fun thinking of the story and writing it. The issue is that whenever people give me negative feedback to the degree of "I don't understand what's going on" "I don't relate to the main character" or the most recent of the new triad "Unoriginal," it stops being fun.
I love these ideas, but I've been struggling to implement them in a way that is fun for me and able to get across what I want to the audience.

It seems as if the problem isn't the writing itself but the fear that your writing will receive negative feedback because of previous experiences of receiving negative feedback. As a result of that fear the self-censor within you is curbing your creativity.

I wrote and self-published a novel that was so bad that I do not speak its name. Almost twenty years later I am still terrified of making the same mistakes as I did with that novel and it hinders my creativity and my writing in general. Learning that even the most successful writers here in New Zealand have never earned enough from their books to make a living from them hasn't helped either.

There's plenty of good advice from others in this forum but I think the two most important pieces of advice they offer is read plenty of books for ideas and inspiration (including ideas about the writing style) and keep writing until you have completed the story you want to tell.