Hit 50,000 words on my novel draft and now I'm split on whether to keep going or scrap it

I just crossed 50,000 words on a fantasy novel about a librarian who gets trapped in a city made of books. Half of me thinks that's a solid milestone and I should push through to the end, but the other half worries the plot is too messy to fix. The setting is inspired by the Boston Public Library, and I'm wondering if a big rewrite would just waste all that time. Has anyone else hit a word count that made them question their whole approach?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_lane1mo ago

Oh, have you tried writing the bad ending first? I did that once with a story about a guy who finds a door in his basement that leads to a 1950s diner. I got 30,000 words in and realized the ending I had planned just made everything pointless. So I wrote the worst possible ending on purpose. Like he wakes up and it was all a dream, the diner was actually a metaphor for his job at a call center. It was so bad it actually helped me figure out the real plot. Maybe try writing the messiest, most broken version of how it ends. It can't be worse than scrapping the whole thing you know.

linda_ward29d ago

Went into this thread ready to say keep pushing through no matter what, but @fiona_lane's idea about writing the worst ending on purpose actually flipped my thinking. Got stuck at 40,000 words on a mystery about a missing painting and just sat on it for months. Finally sat down and wrote the dumbest resolution I could think of - the painting was behind a bookshelf the whole time and the detective had just forgotten to check. It was so bad it made me laugh and then suddenly I could see where the real clues were supposed to go. Might be worth a shot before you scrap anything.