Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

Are Abandoned Projects a Sign of Creative Weakness?Release Date: March 25, 2026Writers I work with—and if I’m honest, I myself—launch multiple projects, enthusiastic about every idea. We open a document, give it a working title, tap out a few paragraphs with loads of energy. Like the squirrel, we scamper around the Internet or library doing research, gathering quotes and anecdotes to incorporate into this shiny new work-in-progress.A few days or weeks later, we abandon it, our sentences as sparse as the squirrel’s twigs up in that tree. The raw materials of a project—research, paragraphs, quotations—sit on our hard drive. Will we return to it and continue building or abandon it for projects with more potential?Often we do abandon the project and scamper off to start another one.Weeks or months later, we might open our Finder window or Google Drive and scroll through our archives, astonished to see so much unfinished business: half-drafted projects, a concept of a book, or the start of a post. We can feel like