The Secret Reason Successful Writers Abandon Novels—and How You Can Overcome It
So as I was browsing through that story over the weekend, it occurred to me that the project wasn’t a failure.
It was a success—precisely because it taught me things I needed to learn. I wrote 5 or 6 unfinished or unpublished novels before I finally sold one. Each of those was a necessary stepping stone along the way. The value was in the doing, day in and day out, for years and years.
It wasn’t a failure to walk away from those projects. It was school, and I’m a better writer because of them. As I recall, Stephen King didn’t get published until his sixth novel. Those first five weren’t failures. They were metaphorically his kindergarten and his third grade and sixth grade and ninth grade and eleventh grade. Then he finally wrote one that worked, and he metaphorically graduated.
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