Nothing is ever wasted

 I'm struggling through the middle of a novel first draft right now.  I'm only half-way through, and it's taking me far longer to write than a novel usually does.

When I started the story I fell in love with the setting and the idea of people living and working there.  That first third of the book got written fairly swiftly, and I'm happy with it for a first draft.  The trouble came when I sent my characters to a different setting to investigate a mystery.  I thought the discovery of something bad going on there would add to the story's tension, but I was wrong,

I've just written the shocking reveal of what the baddies were up to, and it's flat and limp.  It really doesn't work at all.  But I know that I'm in the soggy middle of the novel, and that when I go back to it later it won't look as bad as I feel it is now.  But I've written a lot of novels, and by now I've developed an instinctive feel for what's working and what's not.  And my gut feel about this piece is that it isn't working,.

It isn't bad enough to warrant me abandoning the novel.  I've always finished everything I've started, and I  have no reason not to this time.  I do have a detailed chapter plan for the book, so it's a case of gritting my teeth and turning those notes into story chapters.  I will finish it because the last third returns to the original setting and I sense to story will pick up again when I return there.  So I have that promise to keep me going.

If I decide not to continue with the novel, nothing I've written will be wasted.  I'm exploring ideas for writing a series of novellas, and the novel could well end up providing the material for one series.  I can see that I would be able to 'top and tail' the story, cutting out the middle third and using the beginning and end for one novella.  The middle third might then get expanded to provide a later novella in the series.

The 6,000 word fantasy story I recently wrote got rejected after a week, and I'm planning on using that idea to write a series of fantasy novellas about those same characters.  So that story too won't be wasted.

There's a tendency to see putting manuscripts into a drawer as a waste of time and effort, but in fact it's anything but that.  If I fell in love with a story idea then I've done a lot of prep work on that idea by writing that earlier story.

It's better to consider the abandoned manuscripts as research.  I've created the characters, and the world they live in, and worked out what their problem or challenge is.  That knowledge then frees me to go on and write the correct story about them, the one that does work this time.