[Everything in this post is copied from this Reddit post. Kudos go to the original author.]

Your initial blast of inspiration came and went weeks, months, years ago. It was fantastic. Everything was going to fit perfectly together and would flow with mellifluous ease. You knew exactly what you wanted to do with the story, the way it would impact the reader, would make him see the world in a new and peculiar way. Or maybe not quite yet, but you had a strong enough idea that there was no way it wouldn't work.

Now you're stuck knee-deep, toiling away at a story whose usefulness you begin to doubt every time you even think about working on it. It has gotten to be such a mess that you can't even grasp it as a whole anymore. That initial inspiration, your whole reason for beginning the piece, has either changed or is muddled to the point where it hardly even matters anymore. And the stuff that has come out is shit. The characters aren't fleshed out enough. This chapter doesn't lead into that chapter in the way you want it to. Every time you write something that you think sounds great, you reread it only to discover that it sounds like you're trying way too hard. And all that besides, the plot that you thought was so cool? It's boring. You've thought about it so much that you can't possibly imagine what you saw in it at first.

Somehow you've gotten this far. But is it worth it to keep pushing? What's the point? Shouldn't you just start afresh? Cut your losses and start something new, using the experience you've gained from this failure? After all, there's this cool new idea that you have... maybe it would work better...

NO.

Now, and this is just, like, my opinion, man, but I'm a very firm proponent to doing everything you can to finish each story you start. I want to explain why, and how. It's easier than you think. Really, it is. No, I know, I know how hard it is, how fucking painful every fucking word can be, how easy it is to feel stuck in a Vietnam War-like scenario, but trust me. Or at least hear me out.

I used to hop from one story to the next. Didn't finish anything, didn't think it was worth it. Thought I was developing too rapidly, that my skills were improving to the point where I was leaving my old stories in the dust. But after months and years, I realized that, like this guy, I had nothing to show for it but broken fragments of stories, unfleshed-out ideas, half-formed characters, etc. So I decided, one day, that I would start a new story (hah) but THIS TIME I would push myself and finish it, not matter how shit it was.

And guess what? It was shit.

But, guess what else? I finished, and it felt great. From then on, I was hooked.

Finishing a story is hard. Sometimes it's easy, sure; sometimes you're in the zone and it all just comes out. Splat. But don't count on that if you want to actually make something worthwhile. Nine times out of ten, it's hard. And sometimes it can be more mentally demanding than anything a lot of us have ever dealt with in our lives, particularly if you're smart and sailed through school without really having to push yourself to the limit. You feel like you've lost the thread, like there's no hope for anything, like a failure. Those feelings are not something you would normally volunteer to deal with. So it's easier to just cut your losses and start afresh. Feels good. But those bad feelings are precisely the ones that you will and should have to go through one way or the other if you want to finish anything worthwhile.

Listen. Not everything you write is going to work. A lot of it won't. A lot of it should just remain hidden in the recesses of your harddrive and should never be shown to anybody under any circumstances. And guess what? That's fine. It sucks, it's really fucking hard to come to terms with, but it's fine. You have to fail repeatedly if you want to succeed. And each failure is a step in the right direction.

But if you don't finish your story, how will you know it's a failure? How will you know why it failed? How will you know where in the story the failure happened? And how will you know it cannot possibly be salvaged?

That initial inspiration came from somewhere. It's an itch that you need to scratch. So just keep scratching at it until you find the best way to scratch it.

You can always edit. Always. You can take a story you wrote ten years ago and edit it. Come up with a new ending, a new intro, whatever. You can rework it, you can steal bits and pieces from it and make something new. But you need to have something there to work with.

What's more, no matter how shitty your current story is, writing it will give you experience, so that your next story, which you can start AFTER YOU FINISH THIS ONE, will be that much better.

So keep going. All those doubts, fears, insecurities; don't let them stop you. Yeah, you suck, you're a shit writer, you don't know how to put words together, your sentences sound like they've been dragged along the highway for three hundred miles, your characters are idiots and they're not doing what they're supposed to, the reader will never get it, etc.

Don't listen. Just keep going, one word after the other, one sentence after the other, one page after the other, one chapter after the other, one story after the other, one book after the other. Story isn't working? Skip ahead a bit if you need to. Edit your earlier chapters. Delete, as I once did, 16,000 words and reroute the entire path of the story if you need to. Set a daily word limit, a daily time limit, and mark on your calendar for each day you've done that until you have a nice long uninterrupted line. But keep going. You'll make it out alive.

Addendum: Okay, yes, I know, some stories really just don't work and they're never going to and you were an idiot for even thinking they would. If you really really really want to abandon something, go ahead. But at LEAST put SOME kind of ending in there, even if it's as stupid as "Then a meteorite came and blew them to smithereens. FUCK YEAH." It'll give you some sense of closure and I really do think will help you move on with your life. Just... don't publish it.