Know when to let a story die

As important as knowing when a story can be improved, when it has problems to fix, and when it's finally ready for the world to receive, it's just as important to know when a story you're working on isn't going to work.

For years, I worked on what I hoped would be my first novel. It was a zombie story with what I thought was a unique hook. I finished a draft and was in the process of editing it when I learned of another book that had already been published and would soon be turned into a movie, The Girl with All the Gifts.

My heart sank as I read up on this work by someone else. There were too many similarities, too many parallels to ignore. Someone else had beaten me to the punch. The zombie genre is a notoriously somewhat limited genre. It's hard to think of an idea that hasn't been done already, so I should not have been surprised when someone else came up with a similar idea as me.

Sometime later, I attempted the zombie novel again. I felt I had rejigged it enough to differentiate from The Girl with All the Gifts while keeping my own spin. I hadn't gotten far into it when I was telling a friend about it, and my friend, upon hearing my plan for the main character, said, "Oh just like The Last of Us?"

This was when The Last of Us was still only a video game. The TV show had not come out yet. I had heard of The Last of Us but never played it (I'm nowhere near the gamer I used to be). I just knew it as some kind of zombie game and never gave it more attention than that. 

However, learning others had developed similar ideas as me was not what convinced me to finally lay my zombie novel to rest nor was it the fear that any further re-tooling would be rendered obsolete by some other zombie book or movie in the future.

What finally convinced me was twofold. First, I had other stories and ideas I wanted to write, ones I was more enthusiastic about and eager to work on.

Second, my zombie novel had become an albatross, a weight pulling me down. I lost my passion and energy for it, and for a long time, it felt like an obligation, something I had to complete before I worked on other projects. Not only did this keep me away from other things I wanted to work on, it made me resentful toward the zombie novel. My progress all but evaporated, and I wasn't getting anything done.

Eventually, I moved on to other things: a short story here, a script there, etc. Stuff I thought I could blaze through and churn out before returning to the big project. I was just taking a little break here and there, I told myself.

Gradually, I realized it had been a long time since I worked on or even thought about the zombie novel, and I was fine with that. In fact, I was happy.