Four steps for restarting (or abandoning) a stalled book project
About 20% of the time, authors I work with stop making progress. This pause often lasts months. It also saps authors’ energy and creates guilt and sadness.
If this is you, I want you to feel better. So here’s some advice on what to do if your book appears to be stalled.
Step 1: Forgive yourself
If you’re reading this, know that you’re part of a very large group. Book projects have to compete with two other huge priorities: life and work. When life gets complicated or work gets busy, you put the book on the shelf. After a little while, it seems very hard and intimidating to get back to it.
This happens to everyone. It happened to me. I got all excited about Build a Better Business Book, wrote a bunch of chapters, and then dealt with a death in the family and pandemic madness. Picking it back up seemed impossible.
If you talk to other authors, you’ll be amazed how many have had a similar experience. We don’t like to talk about it, because it interferes with the image of expertise and confidence we want to project. It’s the silent secret we all share.
So put the guilt aside. The question now is: what are you going to do about it? It’s time to take a dispassionate look at what you started to create and apply logic to decide what to do next.
Step 2: Re-examine your motivation
Why did you want to write a book in the first place? Prestige? Passion to share an insight? or a desire to generate revenue?
Often, changes in our lives shift our priorities. Now is the time to re-examine what is important to you. Would this book really fit well with what you plan to do in the next few years?
Just as an example, if you just got a promotion and your new job is consuming you, maybe you want to concentrate on that instead. If your family is going through a crisis, you may need to put you energy into that and put the book aside. There’s no shame in doing what’s most important right now.
On the other hand, you may think back to what got you excited about the book in the first place and realize that it’s still a powerful motivation for you. Changes in your situation may even make it more compelling than it was when you got started.
So decide now: do you still want to do a book, or is it a dream from which you’ve moved on?
It can often help to speak with a friend or mentor about this decisions; they can help you reflect on what’s important to you at this juncture in your life.
Step 3: Go back and read what you wrote already
If you’re not completely disorganized, you’ve got your book notes and drafts squirreled away somewhere. Block off a few hours and go read what you wrote.
With a months of perspective behind you, you’ll often gain new insights on the ideas that motivated you. Your reaction to what you wrote is a big clue to what you should do next.
If you read what you wrote and say think, “Wow, this seems naive” (or irrelevant, or misguided, or wrong), you’ve mentally moved on from your idea. That’s evidence that you might want to tie it up neatly and file it under “an idea I once had.” It’s pretty hard to convince yourself to put effort into a book that no longer seems relevant.
If you read what you wrote and think, “This is intriguing, but I have new insights on this now,” then you may become motivated to improve it. Maybe your block came about because your ideas had become obsolete. You could consider salvaging what’s worth keeping and revise the rest base on your new ideas.
Or, you might fall back in love with your idea. When I read the chapters I’d put aside on Build a Better Business Book, I thought to myself, “Hey, this is actually really good.” (I tend to love my own prose, which is a good mental attitude for a professional writer.) It turned out to be a good foundation for what I ended up writing. I had a new insight that required a completely new first chapter, but the rest was well worth keeping.
Step 4: Decide on a path forward
Now that you’ve evaluated your priorities and the state of your work, it’s time to decide how to move on. Your next step is likely one of the following:
- Shut down the project. Sigh, archive it, and move on. Take stock of what you learned that could be useful in the future.
- Clear an obstacle. Sometime you can’t move on because something specific is stopping you. For example, you need to secure permission to own your intellectual property from your employer. Or you need to read a competing book and decide how to position against it. Or you need to hire a writing coach to help you reconnect with your motivation. The next step may not be writing. Resolve to take that next step, and give yourself a deadline.
- Retrench and revise. If your review of what you wrote convinces you that the idea behind the book needs to shift, start over. Reconceive the project. Start working on the new idea. And figure out what you can repurpose from what you already created. You may find that a lot of what you created is still useful in some form, even under the umbrella of a new concept.
- Pick up where you left off. If, like me, your review of the work in progress is encouraging, now’s the time to resume working on it. Nobody will know you took six months or a year off in the middle. Reconnect with the energy of your writing and thinking and ignore the fact that the completion dates of your drafts have a huge gap in the middle.
Step 5: Repair and update commitments
People don’t usually work on books alone. That means there were people you were working with, or who knew about your efforts. It’s time to update them.
If you have a publisher, tell them what path you’ve decided on and resolve your commitment to them.
If you have collaborators or coauthors, it’s time to repair that relationship. You’ve likely included them in the decisions you made steps 2-4.
If you have helpers — for example, researchers, coaches, or editors — explain what you’ve decided and suggest how you’d like to involve them.
In my own case, my publisher Naren Aryal at Amplify had been bugging me regularly about what was happening with my book — to the point where I eventually told him never to bring it up again. When I decided I was ready to resume work, we negotiated the rest of our deal and were pleased to keep working together. His patience and faith in me created a strong relationship that has continued through the publication of my book and beyond.
Tying up these loose ends will make you feel better. And you’ll often find these relationships helpful as you resume work on your book (or even if you shelve it).
People want you to succeed. This is your chance to reconnect with them, even as you reconnect with the power of your own idea.