Chopping my way through the underbrush of a short story in progress.  I have the vaguest notion of what I might want it to be about, and where some of the plot reversals might be, but I'm figuring out specifics through writing it.  And erasing bits.  And rewriting them.  And moving paragraphs around.  And taking breaks for breakfast and cleanup.  And looking up specifics of the shared world for which I'm writing the story.  And getting distracted by a million and one other things that need doing or are just fun to do.

A comment from someone this morning got me thinking about teaching aspiring writers.  I've been doing so off and on for probably more than a decade now, usually in a program that has a specific length, during which the intention is for the student to improve upon their writing skills by practising them over the course of the term with the guidance of an instructor.

Sometimes people will begin the term with a novel already written, or substantially written.  Sometimes those people will ask me whether they can just send me the whole novel on the first day of term.   I generally say no, and ask them to just send me an excerpt, as the other students are doing.

Why?  Because here's the most frequent scenario I encounter; I read a chunk of the student's writing and perceive that from its core on out, their novel isn't working.  And from the ways in which it isn't working, I can tell that attempting to rewrite it is probably not the answer; not at this stage.  This person needs to learn how to construct a novel before they can figure out how to deconstruct and rewrite one. They may well be quite talented, but it's not really showing, because they haven't had enough practice using their tools.  No shame in that; it's where beginning writers start from.  And hell, they've actually written a novel, which shows an admirable amount of dedication and focus.

In cases like that, I'll generally advise the student to put the existing novel aside and begin a new project with me to guide them.

Few people take that advice.  They're so invested in all the work they've done on the existing novel, all the time they've put in, that they can't bear the thought of starting from scratch with something new.  Instead they get stuck, doggedly reworking the novel in hand and not progressing any farther in their dreams of becoming published novelists.

Here's the thing; working fiction writers get used to tossing out whole concepts, proposals, chapters, novels and starting again.  We get used to putting novels in a drawer because nobody will buy them, and moving on to the next project.  It's all part of the job.  In the course of rewriting this blog post, I deleted about half of it and changed the rest.

It's good practice to learn when to move on to a new project, and when to stick to your guns and finish the existing project.  If your mentor's advising you to move on and you think they're wrong, you may well be quite right about that.  But for a few months, what would it hurt to try working on a brand new novel?  It'll clear your head and give you some perspective on the previous novel, and it might even help you become a better writer.