In a post on the Pub Rants blog, Kristin Nelson says even the most talented writers can’t save the wrong story. “All writers need to learn this one simple lesson: Give yourself permission to ‘fail’,” Nelson says. “In doing so, you might actually discover the story you should be writing.”
When Nelson’s client Marie Lu was working on her novel, Young Elites, the novel wasn’t working even after several revisions. The story only gelled when Lu realized that she’d chosen the wrong POV character. Once she substituted her protagonist for a side character, everything clicked. “Marie is incredibly talented, but numerous attempts at revision were not going to fix the fact that she initially had the wrong POV character,” Nelson says. “If a project isn’t coming together, try a radical shift in POV, first person to third, change up the narrative timeframe.”
Another client, Rhiannon Thomas, wrote the first 75 pages of her young adult fantasy novel, but couldn’t get the rest of the novel to work. “After multiple revisions, she bravely set this story aside to tackle something new,” Nelson writes, suggesting that it’s okay to fail at one project, because it might reveal the story you should work on instead.
