hello anon! full disclosure i'm guy whose primary wip is turning 5 this year and also guy who regularly returns to wips i dropped years ago to finish them after everyone has already left the party BUT i do think it's important to triage wips depending on your personal cost/benefit analysis, because we all have a finite amount of time and energy in our lives. for me that looks like estimating how much i have left until the fic is done and weighing it against how much i like the idea and how much i've thought through what actually happens in the fic / how realistic it is for me to finish. since i have extremely limited free time for writing these days i tend to prioritise ease of completion above all else, so if i only have like 500 words of a very vague idea that i think will end up at around 10k but am not entirely sure where it's going, then i'm more likely to switch focus to something where i think i'm a couple k away from finishing (whether that's actually true or not is a vastly different question…) and know what i need to write to get there. you might assign different weights to these factors (eg maybe you value the idea more than the proximity to the finish line); the breakdown is fully up to you.

i also find that i hit a stage in every single wip where i'm irrationally convinced that it sucks and i should quit and move onto something i can execute better and/or quit writing altogether, and the only way out of that particular feeling is through unfortunately, so i've gotten used to recognising that it's a warped self-perception thing that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of how good/bad the fic is and just pushing through. my view is always that it's better to have a fic that is imperfect but done and on paper where it can be improved, as opposed to a fic that is perfect but trapped in your head. i feel like we are often our own harshest critics and what we think isn't translating well is actually fine to someone outside of our minds. it definitely helps me to talk through scenes or plot points i'm stuck on with a friend! just last week i was complaining to pea about not knowing what the central conflict of my current exchange wip should be and she instantly came up with the perfect solution. or sometimes all a wip needs is some resting time. you can always put something on pause and revisit it later (and usually when i do this i find it isn't as bad as i remember), even if "later" is years down the track.

hope this helps! lmk if you'd like me to talk more about the process of pushing through / writing motivation generally, i have a few old ccs on the topic and would be happy to repost <3