Does Your Work-In-Progress Need a Reset?

What my trip to Vietnam and your manuscript might have in common

I’m in Vietnam for two weeks, and it was day five when my husband and I realized the trip wasn’t living up to our expectations.

That realization isn’t unusual for our international trips…

Sometimes, we discover that we’ve overplanned. We have too many activities lined up. We’re missing the opportunity to soak in the culture. To sit with a glass of wine in a streetside cafe, pretend to be a local, and watch the world go by.

Other times – like this trip – we find we didn’t plan enough. The area around our hotel offers views of other tourists, not life as a local. We anticipated being able to DIY our activities, but it's hard to see anything of substance without a tour guide.

If we kept going with our “just wing it” plan, we’d miss a ton of what this country has to offer.

So, we paused and did a reset.

We took stock of what we liked and disliked so far, and what we wanted the rest of the trip to look like. Then, we did a little research and came up with a solid game plan for the rest of our vacation.

I do something similar almost every time I draft a manuscript. No matter how much I think I know going in, there’s always a moment where I need to pause and take stock. Am I still telling the story I set out to tell? What do I need to do to finish the story in a satisfying way?

There’s loads of advice floating around the writing world saying you should ignore those questions and just keep writing. No matter that the story isn’t going how you thought it would. “Finish the draft and fix it later!”

But what if I applied that same advice to my trip? I could write this trip off as a ‘bad first draft,’ and tell myself I’d do better next time.

That’s ridiculous, though. You don’t waste a trip like this. My husband and I took two weeks off work and flew halfway around the world. It would be a waste of time and resources to decide that this will be a bad trip and do nothing about it until our next visit.

Drafting takes an extraordinary amount of time and energy, too. There might not be hard costs involved, but when you opt to write instead of doing something else, that’s an opportunity cost. If you feel like your story is going off course mid-draft, it’s worth it to pause and reassess.

If I didn’t enjoy this trip, I wouldn’t give it a redo. I’d pick somewhere else to go. If the story you’re writing isn’t the one you want to tell, you’re less likely to pick it back up and revise.

We hired guides – people who know the area and can help us make the most of our time here in Vietnam. It’s made the last couple days of our trip way more fun. Why not do the same for your novel?

If you’re stuck in the middle of a novel that feels like it’s going nowhere, let’s chat. I'll help you find your way back to the story you want to tell. You'll also get clear next steps so you can make the most of this draft.

I have a few intro call openings the week I get back. They’re completely free, with no strings attached.