When You Can’t Fix This Book

(I tell beginning writers a lot that sometimes it's more useful to move on to another manuscript than to try to fix an old one, but here are some of the reasons I've seen for not being able to fix a book)

1. It’s a book you started years and years ago.
2. It’s actually a book that you first wrote as a kind of tribute to a certain book/writer that you love.
3. There are world building problems that you can’t address without changing the whole plot.
4. Your characters are immature or not multi-dimensional.
5. There are too many inside jokes.
6. It’s a book that’s really fanfiction.
7. You don’t love this book or feel a passion for it anymore. It feels like a duty to get it right.
8. Every time you’ve sat down to revise it, a million new gremlins start appearing out of the woodwork, showing new problems with it.
9. You love parts of the book that don’t show up on the page because they’re waiting for book 9 to come out.
10. Nothing happens in it. It’s all set up.
11. You wrote this book to please a teacher/parent.
12. This book is a thinly veiled excuse to get back at someone in your own real life.