Published August 25, 2025
You started strong. The first chapter felt alive. But now, 20,000 words in, the file hasn't been opened in three weeks. You tell yourself you'll get back to it, but you already know how this ends. You've done this before.
Most writers have unfinished novels. Not one. Several. That folder on your desktop with three abandoned drafts isn't a sign that you're not a real writer. It's proof that finishing a novel is genuinely hard.
But here's the thing: abandoned drafts usually don't fail because the story was bad. They fail because the system for finishing them was missing. The story might have been fine. The writer just ran out of momentum, lost track of progress, or couldn't see the path to the end.
Let's talk about why that happens, and what actually works to fix it.
In the beginning, every session feels productive. You're building characters, setting up conflict, discovering your voice. But around 20,000 to 30,000 words, the newness wears off. You're in the messy middle, and suddenly every session feels like pushing a boulder uphill.
You write 800 words and it doesn't feel like anything. You're still 50,000 words from the end. The gap between where you are and where you need to be feels infinite, so you stop looking at the manuscript. A week goes by. Then two. Then it's been a month and opening the file feels like facing failure.
The fix: Make progress visible. Track your word count daily, not just as a raw number, but as a chart that shows momentum. When you see "14 days in a row" or "7,000 words this week," the messy middle stops feeling pointless. You're not just writing into a void. You're building something real.
You told yourself you'd write 2,000 words a day. That lasted three days. Now you're behind schedule, and every session feels like catching up instead of making progress. The guilt compounds until the whole project feels like a failure.
Writers abandon novels not because they stopped writing, but because they stopped believing they could finish. And that belief dies when the goal feels out of reach.
The fix: Set a pace you can actually sustain. Maybe that's 500 words a day. Maybe it's 1,000 words three times a week. The goal isn't to write fast. The goal is to not quit. A slow, steady pace finishes more books than sprints followed by burnout.
You know where your story starts. You know where it ends. But the middle? That's just 80,000 words of "stuff that happens." Without a clear structure, the middle becomes a slog. You write scenes that feel disconnected. Nothing feels like it's building toward anything.
Eventually, you stop because you're not sure what comes next. And if you don't know where the story is going, why would you keep writing?
The fix: Break your novel into smaller pieces. Not a detailed outline (unless that works for you), but clear milestones. Act 1 ends at 25,000 words. Act 2 midpoint at 50,000. Climax at 75,000. When you know which section you're working on, the middle stops feeling like an endless void. You're not writing 80,000 words. You're finishing Act 2.
You missed one day because of work. Then another because you were tired. By day five, the habit was broken. Getting back felt harder than starting over with something new, so you just... didn't.
This isn't about discipline. It's about friction. When you lose momentum, restarting feels like climbing a wall. So you avoid it. And the longer you avoid it, the harder it gets.
The fix: Build accountability into your process. Streaks work because they make the cost of quitting visible. If you're on day 12 of writing every day, you don't want to break that chain. And if you do break it, the goal is to start a new streak immediately instead of abandoning the project entirely.
Around 30,000 words into your current novel, a new idea hit you. It felt exciting, fresh, full of possibility. Your current draft felt tired and messy. So you opened a new file and started something new.
Three months later, you have two abandoned drafts instead of one.
The fix: Finish what you start before chasing the next idea. Not because new ideas are bad, but because the pattern of starting and abandoning trains you to never finish. Keep an idea file for future projects. Write down the new concept, save it, and go back to your current draft. The new idea will still be there when you're done.
Based on what I've seen work (for myself and for other writers), finishing a novel comes down to a few key things:
Visible progress. You need to see that the work is adding up. Charts, streaks, and totals make effort feel real.
Sustainable pace. Writing 500 words a day for 6 months beats writing 2,000 words a day for 2 weeks and then burning out.
Clear milestones. Break the novel into parts, acts, or chapters. Smaller wins keep you moving forward.
Accountability systems. Streaks, deadlines, or tracking tools that make skipping harder than showing up.
Commitment to finishing before starting something new. New ideas are always shinier. Finish the current draft first.
I built Authorlytica because I kept abandoning my own novels. Every time I tried to track progress in a spreadsheet, I'd stop updating it. Every time I set a rigid schedule, I'd fall behind and give up. I needed something that made progress visible and accountability easy without adding friction.
Here's what works:
It's not magic. You still have to write the book. But it makes the process of finishing feel possible instead of overwhelming.
Finishing a novel is hard. Not because writing is hard (though it is), but because staying consistent over months is hard. Life gets in the way. The middle drags. New ideas distract you. Progress feels invisible.
The writers who finish aren't more talented. They just have systems that keep them going when motivation fades. They track their progress, set sustainable paces, break their work into milestones, and don't let a missed day turn into a missed month.
If you have abandoned drafts sitting in your folder, you're not broken. You just didn't have the right system. Pick one of those drafts, set up a way to track your progress, and start again. This time, with a system that actually helps you finish.
Finish it anyway. Not because it's good, but because finishing trains you to finish. The next book will be better, but only if you prove to yourself that you can actually complete a draft. You can always revise or trunk it later.
However long it takes. Some writers finish in 3 months. Some take 2 years. The pace matters less than consistency. A slow, steady writer who doesn't quit will finish more books than a fast writer who burns out and stops.
If outlining helps you stay on track, yes. If it kills your momentum, no. The goal isn't to have a perfect plan. The goal is to finish. Use whatever method keeps you writing.
Then this time, do something different. Don't just open the file and hope it works. Add a tracking system. Set a smaller daily goal. Break the novel into clear milestones. Change the conditions so you're not repeating the same pattern that led to quitting before.