How Do You Know When It’s Time to Blow Up Your Book?

Have you ever looked at a project you’ve poured years of your life into and realized… it’s fine? Not catastrophic. Not terrible. Just fine.

No one wants to read a book that’s fine — and I am certain you don’t want to write one.

The first step in making sure you do better than fine is to catch yourself when you know you’ve hit a wall — which is way easier said than done.

We get so used to plowing ahead, getting the words down, prioritizing FINISHING that we often forget to stop and make sure we are writing what we really want to be writing. Think of that pause like checking in with your gut or your heart: do you love this?

Because if you don’t love it, your readers aren’t going to love it, either.

In this Write Big episode, KJ and I sit down for an honest, behind-the-scenes look at what happens when you hit a wall—and decide to set off a stick of dynamite instead of trying to climb over it. Both of us recently threw out huge portions of our current projects (my Write Big book, and KJ’s novel) to start fresh from page zero.

I share the story of my 12-hour wrestling match with ChatGPT over the books subtitle (yeah — 12 hours on the subtitle), the “tough love” reality check I got from #amwriting recurring guest therapist Dr. Diana Hill, and how answering one simple question—are you actually centering your reader?—changed everything about my book’s tone, structure, and voice.

Meanwhile, KJ opens up about why she threw out her protagonist, embraced a dual-timeline structure, and ignored the well-meaning advice of friends who told her NOT to keep starting over.

We talk about:

* How to recognize when a book is polite or timid instead of alive.

* The difference between an echo chamber (which AI can sometimes be) and a true truth-teller.

* A method for salvaging the gold from an abandoned draft without getting bogged down by old words.

* Why starting over isn’t “falling behind”—it’s standing up for your conviction.

If you’re feeling stuck, lost, or secretely suspecting your current draft needs a radical pivot, we encourage you stop playing it safe and build something alive.

Let’s get back to work and finish work we LOVE.

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Books Mentioned

* Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist

* John Wooden’s books on coaching basketball

* Serena Bowen’s novel: Big Stick Energy

* Virginia A. Evans’s The Correspondent

Transcript

Jennie: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Jennie Nash, and you’re listening to the #amwriting podcast, the place where we help writers of all kinds play big in your writing life, love the process, and stick with it long enough to finish what matters most. This is a Write Big episode, where I bring you short conversations, this one might not be so short, about the mindset shifts that shape the work, and today I’m talking to KJ.

Jennie: Hi, KJ.

KJ: I’m so excited to be here. This is... Uh, you know. I’ll be here lots. This is great. Uh, the, the behind-the-scenes stuff- Is the behind the scenes stuff? KJ

Jennie: often-

KJ: And here we are just to like, you know, having a nice normal, um, a podcast, so

Jennie: yeah. I know. I’m so excited to talk to you and to share this conversation with our listeners, and we’re talking about

Jennie: So we’re talking about the mindset shifts that shape the work. That’s what Write Big is all about, and [00:01:00] oof, some big ones just happened for us both. Yep. Um, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know we’re both working on projects. They’re very different projects. Um, KJ’s is a novel, mine is a nonfiction book, and I just m- literally dropped a bomb on mine and totally blew it up and started in a new direction, and this is years into it, and you recently did that too, and you- I did

KJ: something very similar

Jennie: you were shy about sharing it with me, which I thought was funny. Um- Oh. ‘Cause you were like- Yeah ... “She’s not in the book anymore.” I was asking her about

KJ: something. That’s right. You’re like, “Oh, and this could be s- “ I, I mentioned something, and I was like, “Oh, yeah.” Yeah,

Jennie: I just mentioned changes. That was when we were in person.

Jennie: We, KJ and I were in person, and you know what? We didn’t take a picture.

KJ: Oh my God, we didn’t. You’re right. Oh, well.

Jennie: We both tra- We have a

KJ: lot of things. Travel It just means we have to do it again [00:02:00] soon.

Jennie: We both traveled great distances in order to have lunch and go shopping and talk about books, and we were walking and chatting about KJ’s book, and, and that’s when I learned she had blown everything up.

Jennie: So how are

KJ: you- We both blew things up. So I got questions. I’m sure you have questions. I have. My first question- Yeah ... you just did this, so how did you know you had to do this?

Jennie: Yeah, I did it yesterday.

KJ: I think that’s ... I know. I think that’s the thing that people wanna know, like, “How did you, how did you know?”

KJ: Okay. “Was it gradual? Was it sudden?” Just-

Jennie: Yeah ...

KJ: you know, j- tell, tell us how we should know if we should do the same thing, which I already did, and I have an answer to this too, so.

Jennie: Yeah, yeah.

KJ: How did

Jennie: you know? So I was ... I had a finished manuscript, and I asked two people to read it for very particular reasons, these beta reas- readers, and they, neither of them were people that I would call

Jennie: They’re not the kinda typical people that I would go to. [00:03:00] They were, they were more, um, regular readers, if that makes sense. They’re, they’re not insidery people like you. I mean, you and I- Me ... have a lot of insidery, inside the industry people. These were not those people. So I had a full manuscript. I took it out to both of them.

Jennie: I got feedback from both of them, and the, the first, the first person’s feedback was- Fine? It was, it was fine. It was like, “This is fine. I want more of this or that.” And it was, it was kind of like, not-

KJ: Fine, huh? Great ...

Jennie: not what anybody wants. Fine. I either want my reader to be like, “Oh, hell yes,” or, “I co- totally don’t get it.”

Jennie: Like, I want, I don’t want fine. So that was the first thing, and then the second reader [00:04:00] said, “I ha- I got some tough love for you.” And this was happened after I was really struggling. I was trying to rewrite while they were doing the beta read, and, you know, f- with my own critique and my own next steps and my own thing, and I found myself unable to go forward because of the title.

Jennie: I kept c