Once upon a time, when my daughter was 4, she was obsessed with the idea of getting a robot horse. McKenna was sure that a robot horse was the answer to all her problems. She thought there could be a basket underneath so that the horse could clean her room for her while she rode it. McKenna told us she would ask for this for her fifth birthday.

When I explained that a room cleaning robot horse didn’t exist, McKenna decided that she could just make her own. On her birthday list, she put, “Wood for building a robot horse.” She had a very clear picture in her mind of what this horse would look like, how it would clean her room, and the joy she would have riding it as it did so.

McKenna was stuck on the idea for quite a while. I don’t remember exactly how long, but I do remember that weeks would pass and I would think she’d forgotten, only to have her randomly ask something like, “Could I use those scraps of wood in the basement for my robot horse?” (Fortunately by the time her birthday arrived, she really had forgotten and was quite happy with Cinderella dress-up clothes.)

I say all this because sometimes as writers we have a clear idea of how fantastic a book of ours is going to be. The characters will leap off the page! The themes will resonate with young and old! Readers will marvel at the complexity of the plot!

And then when we get into the writing , we discover we’re attempting to build a robot horse story.

A robot horse story is one that sounds amazing, but then once you get in there you discover there are problems you couldn’t have foreseen with your current level of experience.

I’ve had this happen a couple of times, especially when I’m trying to experiment with a new genre, style, type of character, etc. In my head it works, but on paper it doesn’t. Maybe in the future, I’ll know more and be able to fix it, or I’ll be able to scrap the story for parts. I’ve certainly done that a time or two, pulled a character or plot line out of an old, broken story to use in something current.

Realizing your story idea is riddled with flaws is one of several reasons why you might decide that you don’t want to finish this book.

Another very common reason for young writers is that your skills are growing so quickly, by the time you finish your manuscript you’re a completely different writer.

This happened to me a couple times early on. I would finish a manuscript and plan on editing, only to realize that I had learned so much in the process of writing the draft. Now on the other side of writing the story, I could see deep flaws inherent with the idea itself, and instead of trying to fix those things, the idea of writing a new story with my gained knowledge sounded much more appealing.

Here are some other reasons you might decide that you don’t want to finish your first draft or you don’t want to bother with editing:

  • Your goal is to be published, and this manuscript is unpublishable for whatever reason.
  • Your energy for this idea completely vanished. You’re having no fun when you work on it.
  • You’ve been working on this book for so long and you’re really tired of it. You need something new.

It’s okay to not finish your book.

Sometimes quitting your book is the best thing you can do for you as a writer, honestly. Sometimes it’s the best thing you can do for the book! Two published books of mine (the first Skylar Hoyt novel and The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet) were books that I stopped working on for a while. I really had no intention of completing either of those, and yet now they’re both published. The break was good for us both!

Do you have a hard time finishing manuscripts or a hard time NOT finishing manuscripts? Are there other reasons besides ones I’ve listed that you’ve chosen to not finish?