What I’m Doing Different

In my blog post a few days ago, I said I finished four novels and hundreds of short stories, and that I had begun more than a hundred novels, but never finished them. I also begun but never finished just as many short stories.

I would say I have been very productive as a writer, maybe even more productive than a lot of writers I know. But most of the writers I know have more sales than I do. Why might this be? Well, aside from the fact that they’re better writers than I am, they have also submitted a lot more stories for publication than I have.

I have (or I had) a tendency.to give up on my projects fast. Even the ones I’d finished, I would decide that they were terrible and no amount of rewriting was going to make them better, and eventually I would throw them out. I threw out a lot of projects, hundreds of them, and some of them probably weren’t half as bad as I thought they were.

Those of you who have been following me on Facebook for the last year or so have probably seen me posting several times about restarting a novel, and more recently I went over what was already written to rewrite parts and get the story back on track so I could move it forward again.

That’s what I’m doing different. Instead of throwing the project out and starting a new one, I’m sticking to the first project until it’s done, cleaned up and ready to go. I don’t care how many times I have to rewrite, or dump the whole thing and restart from a scratch, the project is going to get done and it’s going to be made perfect before I start the next one. It will be the same for every project that follows. I’m not giving up on my projects anymore. I wish I had gotten into this mindset years ago.