3 Ways to Tell if a Manuscript Is Worth Going Back to

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Some trunk novels really are worth going back to. The trick is identifying the salvageable ones.
The other day Romance University posted about why you should pull out the manuscript under your bed. It resonated with me, because earlier this year I returned to an old manuscript that had been poking at my brain for a month. It was a book I’d written almost eight years ago, revised a few times, gotten mixed and lukewarm feedback on, and had figured was an idea that just wasn’t ever going to work.

Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What triggered my desire to return to it, was an out-of-the-blue idea on how to make the premise I loved finally work—a prologue of all things. But it fit this particular book, and when I reread my earlier pages, I realized it had never been as bad as I’d thought. It had just been missing a few key elements.

Read more »Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com