How long should I work on a project before I give up on it?

Recently I decided that I needed to try harder to finish things. It only took me thirty years to arrive at this decision.

Traditionally, if a writing project wasn't working for me on an intuitive level, I tended to let it go. If I liked it but felt as if it was getting away from me, my instinct was to power through it as quickly as possible--like a bad meal that I suspect might be poisoned -- and live with the consequences. As a result, my career is cluttered with a lot of unpublished (and unpublishable) stuff, material whose potential I either ruined or abandoned by refusing to take my time.

My ongoing project is a novel called Stillwater -- nominally, a thriller about a dysfunctional family on a boat being terrorized by something in a New England lake. I started it back in the summer of 2007, finished the first draft that fall, and sent it to my agent, who made some basic suggestions, then passed it onto my publisher. Meanwhile, Random House published my novel Eat the Dark, and got back to me on the book that would become No Doors, No Windows. The notes on No Doors were extensive, and in the middle of that process, I changed editors, and Stillwater sank to the bottom of someone's desk. In the meantime, Random House accepted No Doors, and more or less right away contracted me to write Death Troopers, with the idea that both books would come out at the same time. Those titles hadn't even pubbed when Random House contracted the Death Troopers sequel...and I got to work on that, followed immediately my Supernatural novel.

Sometime around this time, my new editor, Mark Tavani, finally got back to me with his notes on Stillwater, which were far more encouraging -- and far-reaching -- than I'd expected. Mark saw real potential in Stillwater, and his enthusiasm reminded me of how I'd felt about it, a couple years earlier. I got it out and tinkered with it, ended up taking out the entire second half...and then left it alone to write a young adult novel instead. I'd finished that when the notes for the Death Troopers prequel Red Harvest came in...and they were quite extensive too, so back to the bottom sank Stillwater.

Recently, though, with the delivery of my final Red Harvest draft, I found myself casting about for something new -- and remembered my "something's in the lake" book, still drifting around my hard drive. I got it out and discovered that I had some new ideas after all. I started typing them in...and then flew out to LA to work on a screenplay instead.

One way of looking at this is that I've given up on Stillwater a half-dozen times. But another way is that I've never really given up on it, although I have come close enough times that these days, when I tell my wife that I'm getting out Stillwater again, she just gives me an amused look, like, "Don't forget to wear your helmet if you're planning on smashing your head against your desk for a prolonged period of time, dear."

And in a sense, I suppose I am. I've inserted and deleted enough text from the Stillwater file to make up a much longer book, and I've published three other novels in the meantime, but when I sit down to work on the book, I'm generally still pretty excited about the possibilities. There's real magic in it, and if I can find a way to keep from completely screwing it up, I think it could be terrific.

We'll just have to see.