I found the file last week. Buried in a folder I hadn’t opened in maybe two years, there was a document simply titled “Mira.” Thirty-seven pages of notes, scenes, backstory fragments, even a playlist I’d made for her. And I had completely forgotten she existed.
That stung more than I expected.
Mira was supposed to be the protagonist of a novel I was absolutely going to finish. She was a climate researcher in her fifties, estranged from her adult son, haunted by a decision she’d made decades earlier. I remember being so excited about her. I remember thinking she was the one. The character who would finally carry me through a complete draft.
She didn’t. Obviously.
But sitting there, scrolling through all those abandoned notes, I started wondering: what happens to the characters we leave behind? Do they just disappear? Or is there something we can still learn from them, even now?
I used to feel pretty guilty about my graveyard of unfinished projects. Like I was some kind of serial abandoner. A flaky creative who couldn’t commit.
But the more I talk to other writers, the more I realize this is incredibly common. Almost universal, actually. We all have characters we started and stopped. Stories that fizzled. Protagonists who never made it past chapter three.
Sometimes the reasons are practical. Life gets busy. Other projects take priority. The shiny new idea muscles its way to the front of the line.
Sometimes, though, the reasons are harder to name. The character stops feeling right. The story loses its pull. Something in the writing starts to feel like pushing a boulder uphill, and eventually you just stop pushing.
I think that’s what happened with Mira. She was compelling on paper, but when I actually tried to write her scenes, something felt off. Disconnected. Like I was describing her from the outside instead of inhabiting her from within.
At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew it wasn’t working.
Here’s what I’ve started doing, and honestly it’s more of a recent experiment than a proven method. I’ve been going back through my abandoned characters and asking myself one question:
What was I trying to figure out when I created you?
Because I’m starting to suspect that characters aren’t just characters. They’re also questions we’re asking ourselves. Problems we’re trying to work through. Skills we’re trying to develop.
Mira, for example. When I think about her now, I can recognize what I was wrestling with. I wanted to write someone middle-aged, which I’d never really done before. I wanted to explore long-term consequences. I was interested in what it feels like to realize you made the wrong choice twenty years ago and have to live with that.
Those are still interesting questions to me. I just wasn’t ready to answer them yet.
So I went through a few more files. Some of these characters I barely remembered. Others felt like running into an old friend.
There was Daniel, a teenage boy in a post-collapse society. Thinking about him now, I can tell I was trying to write survival without making it feel grim or hopeless. I wanted resilience without toxic positivity. I never figured out how to strike that balance, so Daniel sat there, frozen mid-scene, for years.
There was Aunt Vesper, a side character who took over a short story and then promptly got stuck. She was supposed to be comic relief, but she kept wanting to be tragic. I didn’t know how to hold both of those things at once. Still not sure I do.
There was a nameless narrator in second person, which was a stylistic experiment that went absolutely nowhere. But I learned something from the attempt. Second person is harder than it seems, and I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons.
Each of these felt like a puzzle I’d picked up, turned over a few times, and then set down. Not because I’d solved it. Because I wasn’t ready.
I don’t think there’s a magic trick for finishing every project you start. And honestly, I’m not sure that should even be the goal. Some characters are meant to be practice. Some stories are just sketches. Not everything needs to become a polished final draft.
But I am trying to be more intentional about learning from abandonment.
When I step away from a character now, I try to write a quick note to myself. Just a few sentences. Why did this stop working? What felt hard? What was I trying to do that I couldn’t quite pull off?
It’s not a perfect system. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I’m too frustrated to be reflective. But when I do manage to leave that little breadcrumb, it helps. It means the character isn’t just gone. They’re part of a trail.
One thing I’ve learned the hard way: going back to an old character with the intention of “finally finishing” almost never works. At least not for me. The pressure makes everything seize up.
What does work, sometimes, is revisiting with pure curiosity. Not to fix anything. Just to notice what’s there.
That’s how I ended up spending an afternoon with Mira again. I wasn’t trying to resurrect the novel. I just wanted to understand her better. And weirdly, reading those old notes, I felt something shift. Not a desire to pick up where I left off, exactly. More like recognition. Oh, that’s what I was trying to do. That’s why it was so hard.
Maybe someday I’ll write a character like her again. Older, complicated, living with old regret. And maybe I’ll be more ready then. Or maybe I won’t. Either way, Mira taught me something, even though she never made it off the page.
Not every abandoned character stays abandoned. Sometimes they come back in different forms.
I had a villain I wrote years ago who never quite worked in his original story. Too theatrical. Too obvious. But pieces of him showed up later in a completely different project, folded into a more subtle antagonist. He didn’t survive intact, but he contributed something.
I think that’s how creative work actually operates, if I’m being honest. It’s messier than we like to admit. Characters bleed into each other. Ideas migrate. The thing you couldn’t finish becomes raw material for the thing you can.
So maybe abandonment isn’t failure. Maybe it’s just composting.
If you’ve got old files sitting around, characters you forgot about, stories you never finished, maybe take a few minutes this week to go through them. Not to judge yourself. Not to feel guilty. Just to notice what’s there.
You might be surprised what you find. I certainly was.
And if you feel like sharing, I’d love to hear about it. Who did you leave behind? What were you trying to figure out when you created them?
We’re all walking the same path here. Might as well compare notes.
