What two abandoned manuscripts taught me

I've started three novels. Two were abandoned and remain sitting in my electronic version of a bottom drawer. I had reached 10,000 words with one, and 15,000 with the second. I could not see at the time that they were both missing something: a clear structure holding the story together. So I stopped forcing them, told myself I wasn't a writer, and let them go.

For a long time, I thought I did not have what it takes to write a novel. I had failed. But I tried again with a third one, and got further than I ever had before, a full draft of eighty thousand words.

Looking back over all three manuscripts, I have noticed that there was a theme connecting them all. A theme about putting something right. A character challenging something that had broken her, or wronged her, and working her way through it. Some sense of justice running through the story.

This points to a deeper question worth asking whenever you feel a story won't let you go, even the one you've already assigned to the bottom drawer and abandoned. Why are you writing? What is it inside you that keeps tugging you toward this particular story, this particular wound? A message that keeps finding its way back onto the page. An experience you're still trying to process. It's worth thinking over this question honestly, looking for the theme that keeps emerging through your words, because that's usually the thing that's actually pulling you back, not the plot, not the deadline, but something underneath both.

I think that's what kept bringing me back to write, again and again, even when a manuscript itself didn't survive. You can abandon a story and still not be settled. Something can go on smouldering quietly, waiting to fire up again. That pull is worth naming before you decide a manuscript, or the idea underneath it, is finished with you.

Like I did, it's easy to see an abandoned manuscript as proof you're not a real writer, rather than as information. The plot didn't hold up either time, that's true. But the draw to keep writing it anyway tells you something real, something worth listening to, even after the structure itself has fallen away.

In my two abandoned manuscripts, what was missing was not a lack of time or will or imagination. It was looking at my story from the wrong place. I was thinking about plot events, what happens, then what happens, putting in something dramatic, rather than working from the inside out with the character at the centre of it; what she believed, what she wanted, what she was afraid of losing. Structure that is imposed from the outside doesn't hold, because there's nothing underneath it doing the work.

It wasn't until 30,000 words into my third manuscript that I understood this properly, using the emotional arc method I now teach: a character's belief shapes her emotion, her emotion shapes her decisions, and those decisions are what determine what happens next. Not the event on the surface, but what's happening underneath it. Once I could see my character's belief clearly, the next scene stopped being a guess. It became something which opened up organically.

If you've abandoned a manuscript, or are feeling the frustration with one now, trying to work out why it isn't holding together, it does not mean you're not a writer. Perhaps it means the same thing it meant for me, that you're building from the wrong place, and the fix isn't more discipline or another craft book to read. It's starting again from character, and letting the shape of the story come from there.

I'd love to help you see that shape in your own work. I offer a free 30 minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation about your story and where you're stuck. You can book a time here.