Admitting defeat

For the past two years, I've been working on a novel. It was going to be my first thriller, a different genre than the YA I normally write. I chose it because thrillers are my second favorite genre to read, and I had an idea that I thought would make for a great story. After chipping away at it for so long, I'm finally setting it aside. Giving up on something is hard for me. I'm the type of person who insists on finishing what he started, even if he doesn't want to. I don't stop projects before they're done. I don't DNF books (except on rare occasions), even if I don't like them.

What finally made me stop working on this WIP was how messy the manuscript was getting. I started out with an outline, which made complete sense to me before I began drafting. As I started writing, however, I spotted holes in the plot. I'd fix one plot hole, and another would pop up. It got to the point where I feared the story was going to be an incoherent mess that no one would enjoy reading it. Now that the story is behind me, I can see that I'm not yet skilled enough to pull off the thriller I had in mind. I hope that I'll be a good enough writer in the future to revisit the manuscript again, but for the time being, I'm admitting defeat.

The good news is that I just started working on a new story. I'm going back to writing YA again, and two weeks in, it's going well. Then again, the first two weeks of writing the thriller were also fun and problem-free. :-)