Languishing stories, when to let go

How is it that some stories never escape from my “stories in progress” folder, languishing there, only halfway through a first draft, for months or years?  I’ve been thinking about this question this week because a similar issue came up in a recent writing class. 

“When is it time to let go?” a woman asked.  She meant, “when is it time for me to stop my endless tinkering with this story and send it out?”  But the discussion centered on something else: whether and when to plod through a draft to some kind of ending, for the sake of seeing it through, even when it feels forced.  We didn’t come up with a good conclusion, but we commiserated with the student who talked about the multiple novel drafts that she’s gotten stuck on, with no apparent hope of moving forward. 

I think there’s no real answer to this kind of question.  No one else can say to another writer with any certainty, “your draft will never become a story, so give it up now.”  True, some scenes, concepts, images, even half-drafts may turn out to be just practice, just exercise.  Still, you never know: I had a partial draft of a story, blurry and short, about a lonely woman working nights in a lab and getting into a fight with her friend/co-worker.  I couldn’t figure out what the narrator might want, or even who the narrator should be.  This story draft sat quietly in the “stories in progress” file for a year while I did other things, worked on my novel draft and wrote two other stories and sent some things out. 

Then, not too long ago, I opened the file for this languishing draft, rewrote the first scene, and then kept going.  Now I have only one or two more scenes to write, and after that I can start revising it.  I wish I knew what got me to start again on this draft, whether it was a barely remembered dream, something in the news, something overheard, or just the passage of time.

I know there’s a lot of advice out there on getting through stalled stories.  Here are a few more thoughts: