What is it going to take?!?

If you are losing interest in it, it would be harder to sit down and get into it.

I find that when I get bored with a novel I've been working on forever, that it's a good idea to just put it away and move on to something else. The something else will probably get you excited about the newness of it. Ten years is a long time. Maybe you've given up on it in your heart...if so, it would be hard to keep up the interest. Maybe it's time to just put it aside and put it down to being a great learning experience.

Take the characters out of the confines you have them in...and have fun with them. Do stuff with them...take them into exercises and on-the-spot writings...just have fun with them as characters and leave your story behind for a while. Maybe you have great characters who don't like your plot. Listen to them. Find out where they want to go.

Put it aside. Give it some breathing room. Work on something else. It will help you figure out if it's this project or if you're just having trouble focusing in general. How's real life? I'll admit, I've not had a good couple of months. I can't write. I can't even read... I pick up a book, read the first paragraph, I put it down. This is unusual, yet, forcing myself to do anything just makes it worse.

So, give this particular project a rest. They'll still be there in a few months and you might have some new perspective.

Uncle Jm suggests writing the same novel from a different POV if it's not working for you. I tried it and then went back to the original POV, but it was fun to do.

If that doesn't work, maybe you need a beta who will kill your whole family

I think you need a systemic approach--what is wrong, what it will take to fix it, and what steps need to be taken. This is an approach some people have tried that worked for them.

I'm not saying you should necessarily follow their approach, but I think if you can come up with a strategy that should end with a novel you're happy with, then come up with some sort of time frame that walks you through your strategy and ends with the finished novel in, say, a year, you might have more success.

Note that if you still have actual new scenes to write, you can use a similar approach. You read the existing text, decide what is lacking, decide what sort of scene will correct the deficiency, write the scene, and then move on to the rewrite stage. The snowflake method is another exercise that has helped people to identify their themes and clarify their character arcs, which also goes a long way towards telling you what your book is lacking.

Yet another approach is to use a spreadsheet or index cards. For each scene (or future scene) you identify the characters of that scene, what each character learns or how he changes, what themes are developed in that scene, the prerequisites to this scene, and how the overall story is moved forward. You can also use cards to keep track of things like minor characters moving out of town or dying, so you can avoid some of those classic howlers.

This is also a good way to figure out what scenes are missing. Often it becomes obvious what you'll have to add once you look at a "before" scene and an "after" scene and have written in front of you what the first scene makes happen and what the second scene requires to have happened.

I took a look at your blogs and your profile. I think that while ten years may sound like a long time to some you are still quite young so in this context it really isn't that long. My guess is that this isn't so much about the particular piece you are working on as much as it is a transitioning you are going through. The reason the advice is often given to step away from a project you are stuck on is to let some fresh air into your head so you get a new perspective on the work. The cool thing for you, which is a major advantage over us slightly more uhmm...seasoned persons, is that you automatically get a fresh perspective every 72 hours or so.

What you may be struggling with here is that you may not have allowed the the idea you started with to grow. Sometimes we become so loyal to an idea that we are afraid to give it room to grow and change. I can hear that you want to work on this project, you want to write but you are stuck. I am going to suggest not that you step away from it but rather that you put your manuscript in a chair sit opposite it and ask it "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I think you must have a gem of an idea there and that is why you don't want to let it go. Find out what it wants to be, who the characters want to be and how their world needs to expand. Don't give up or step away even but do stop pounding that square peg into the round hole.

Take each chapter and each character and find out how it wants to expand. They have grown over the last ten years. Are you letting them show that?

Ok long winded yapping comes to a close now. You may get on with your lives. While you can never get that hour of your lives back, I do validate parking.

Could be you've grown out of the story. I had a novel I worked on for a very long time--I had a lot of problems with it running way, way too short, so I kept revising it. In the process of all the time spent on it, the things that had originally inspired me about it no longer did. I didn't realize that until I set it aside and finished a new project. So I ended up shelving it permanently.

Project nachonaco said:

Let me start off this post by saying I have been working on the same novel for almost ten years. It's had several incarnations since I began it.

I wonder if my novel is going stale. I certainly hope not.

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I feel your pain. I worked on my first novel for longer than that but took a break for a couple of years when my kids were real small. The break helped. Like you, I didn't want tol leave my characters hanging. They were very real to me and I wanted to tell their story. After a couple of years off I went back to the novel, finished it, shopped it around for quite a while and sold it.
If you think it's going a bit stale maybe try taking a break from it like I did. Write something else or throw yourself into something other than writing. Your characters will call you back eventually. When they won't shut up day or night you're probably ready to go back and finish your story.

Let me start by saying that I know where you are coming from; my completed novel has been around since about 1998? Probably before then. It look querying it... getting rejected... then I realized that it SUCKED. The plot was way too complicated. So at a certain point in the novel, I started over. I wrote 50k of the new stuff. The novel is sooo much better off... although it is still getting rejected. *shrugs*

My point is that maybe you need a fresh start.

If you've been working on it for ten years, is it possible that it's done? Or that last draft, it was done, but you didn't notice?

TEN YEARS?! Good lord! I'd get bored with it, too. Stop picking it to death. Let it sit for a year or two. Write some new books in between. Don't take a whole decade to write 'em, though. Then come back to your ten-year book and edit it.

Project nachonaco said:

It feels almost like I'm going through the motions. Like a loveless marriage or something.

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That's nice, honey.

*takes a drag from his cigarette*




In all seriousness, I think if you go a few months without getting any strong itch to finish the thing, it's time to work on something new.

I had gotten completely stuck on my first novel attempt when a friend convinced (browbeat) me to do NaNoWriMo. My novel was about characters I loved, so for my NaNo idea I placed them about a year after the other novel idea and threw them into a different adventure. Very freeing. By looking at them from different perspectives and forcing them into different situations, I eventually had an epiphany on how to make the first novel idea work. It took years and several other projects, but I eventually finished the first draft of the first novel.

So if you're stuck, perhaps throw your characters somewhere else and see what happens. Work on something different to recharge your enthusiasm.

I agree with TheIT, put your novel down and go do NaNoWriMo and have some writing fun for the next month or so. Then you could perhaps go back to the one you are working on. Just like a stale marriage, some time off may be beneficial.

I've just started work, again, on a novel I put aside ten years ago. Having written a couple other novels in the meantime, along with teaching myself to write short stories, I have a much different perspective, and I'm looking forward to NaNoWriMoing out the last third of the revived novel, then going back and doing the necessary revision of the first two-thirds.

So putting aside a novel doesn't mean you're killing it. It's amazing how fertile it can become while lying fallow.

At any rate, whether you try a new story or continue to work on the old one, you need to set up a schedule and stick to it. Start out slow, as little as a page a day, five days a week. Push through any misgivings until you have a completed draft. When stuck, freewrite your required pages or number of words.

Though Muses are usually depicted as lissome young women, they are actually kittens. The sound of punched keys attracts them like catnip -- eventually, they must come and lend a paw to the enterprise.

From age 10 to 20 can represent a huge leap in one's attitudes and views and you're bound to see the novel through different eyes as those years pass.

Let it rest.

Wow. Ten years. I just spent a few minutes contemplating the first novel I wrote at 14 and trying to imagine what I would have to done to it in ten years. *shudder* Every novel I've finished since that first one has been better. Not just because I was learning stuff, but because I was giving myself a clean slate on which practice my new skills.

Why not let it rest and try something new?

I'm with everyone else on this one. Put it aside and write something new for awhile. You can always come back to it later on. Sometimes we just get too caught up in something, especially when it isn't working, and need to set it aside.

I'm wondering what exactly you mean by the story not wanting to be told correctly. My way of reading that sounds like the characters wouldn't fit with the story you originally had in your head, though I'm not really certain if that's what you mean or not. If so, definitely set it aside for a little while, and you might have to accept that your original plan won't work. Characters often take on a life of their own, and while some people do, it's never a good idea to try to force characters into a particular circumstance when it doesn't work. Either let them run free and change the plot, or if it's absolutely necessary, you might be able to say "what would it take for him to do (whatever)?" and change your plot a bit to accommodate that. Just a suggestion.