I’ve been working on my first novel for about four years now and this weekend I decided that it’s awful.
I was in the middle of editing in order to give a draft to my primary beta reader next week and as I read and rewrote and read and rewrote I became more and more convinced that the story is plodding, predictable and just plain boring.
I feel sure that when I give it to my reader she’s going to tell me that the entire story doesn’t work and that I need to go back to the drawing board (she’d done it before).
After this much time spent with this story and these characters I’m not sure that I have it in me to start again. You can imagine how much fun I was to be with this weekend.
So what to do? Go on? Give up? Start another book? Take Kate’s suggestion and start drinking heavily?
To be honest, I don’t know. But I’ve come this far and invested this much that I think I owe it to this story and these characters to keep going and see if I can make it work.
I know that every writer has been at this place in the process before. What do you do when you’re here?
Are there any good restaurants?
