What Really Happens When You Set Aside a WIP After 10 Years of Revisions
Last June I set aside the trilogy I’d been striving to revise for 10+ years, because I could no longer see the forest for the trees and it had problems I could not see a way to fix.
It’s gone about like this…
Step One: First, you realize that what you’ve actually done is ripped out a chunk of your heart and left a gaping hole of raw, bleeding soul.
Step 2: You feel like you don’t know your purpose anymore, or where you’re going in life. You’re not even sure if you’ll ever want to write again.
Step 3: Suddenly God provides you with a new story idea, and it’s actually exciting to you and you want to write again!
Step 4: You start writing your new idea and are getting pretty excited about it. And your friends like it!
Step 5: You hit a snag in your new story. You start to have doubts. I couldn’t make that other WIP work after 10 whole years!! What makes me think I’m ANY good at this whole writing thing??
Step 6: And all you want to do is go back to that beloved WIP and talk to those characters and hug them and never let them go…
Step 7: You spend months trying and dropping WIP after WIP. Nothing is coming together. Each new writing project feels like a fresh experiment in discovering your own inadequacy.
Step 8: But you try to have a good attitude about it all. You’re learning, right? You’re growing, right?? This is a GOOD THING, RIGHT?
Step 9: Finally you reach a kind of peace. You’re still not sure where you’re going anymore, and you still think wistfully about the project you can’t go back to yet…but you’ve found assurance again that God has a purpose for your writing and you’re not a failure.
Step 10: Confidence boosted, you charge forward with purpose toward new possibilities.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success. – C.S. Lewis
I haven’t quite reached Step 10 yet…I’m still repeating Steps 7, 8, and 9 (with occasional fallbacks into earlier steps). 
