How Do You Know When It’s Time to Give Up?

Last week at the Bookshop Santa Cruz launch party for The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories I share 5 Plot Tips to Immediately Improve Your Writing. Right after, we give away a free copy of Blockbuster Plots Pure & Simple a friend bought and then passed out raffle tickets for it.

The guy who won BBP appears next in a long line of chatty writers awaiting their books to be signed. He tells me how he finished a fantasy novel in 2006 (or 2009 or… I can’t remember the details) and then rewrote it once the following year.

As he talks, all around us is total chaos, people eating yummy cake and laughing and talking, buying books, sliding out flyers they take for themselves about the plot webinar I’m doing live this Thursday.

Quickly, the winner is replaced by the next writer in line and I’m left imagining how the trilogy of plot resources under his arm holds the promise of relighting his passion for his story.

Suddenly, he’s back again. Now, at the end of the line, he looks crest-fallen, crushed, dazed and has reduced in size and demeanor to about ten years old. I wonder what happened to him between the time I met him and now.

“How do you know when it’s time to give-up, to quit writing?”

The croak of a sob escapes his attempt to swallow.

“You just won a raffle for your writing,” I say as gently as I can when what I really long to do is grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake. “How much more proof than that do you need that now is not the time to quit? Now is the time to keep writing.”

What’s New!
Webinar Plot Workshop hosted by Writers Digest:
Secrets of Story Structure Plot