Reason #8: What's Your Exit Strategy?

Are you "Stay the course", or "Cut and run"? How many novels and stories do you have in the field? How many more are you prepared to deploy?

Recent discussion on various blogs has centred around the idea of quitting writing. The broad consensus seems to be that a writer will inevitably return to writing, in the same way that a chronic masturbator cannot look at their open palm without fleetingly wondering where the nearest bathroom is.

But you can call yourself a 'writer' without any requirement to actually produce anything, which is why it's so difficult to define 'quitting'. Quitting implies failure, or at least non-success, and you can't fail if you never set any standard for yourself.

You can call yourself a 'carpenter' too, but unless you eventually produce a table, you're just whittling.

If you have a goal for your writing, some measure of success, then by definition you have a threshold for failure. The only variable is time - how much you're prepared to waste. If you have no measure of success, then your writing will only ever be good by accident.

If you're only writing to 'please yourself', well, the bathroom is second on the left.