Re: Question for FF authors...

For me, although I love it when people enjoy what I write, if I don't, then I stop. If your example was applicable to me (which it isn't. I don't post much) the most likely cause would be that I didn't like what I had done. A character had stopped "behaving" as I told it too, a scene that I thought would be pivotal was.....fine, but fell flat.........any little thing that readers do not notice, but I as the author had. Because especially with fan-fic, it is all about author satisfaction, in the long run. If I cease to enjoy what I write, I cease to write. You use the word invest well, I think. That is what I do with anything I write--every character is my child, my friend, so if, in what I write, I feel as if I have failed them, I stop. I may go back to the beginning and start again, or I may hide it away, thinking I could never redeem those characters, that plot, that setting.
I guess the "why" differs for everyone, though. When I look at things that I have abandoned, or chopped into bits and re-started, it is because I am not satisfied with what I have done, even if my editors and readers like it.
It probably seems rather pathetic to you, or any reader who has had it done to them. But writing is a lot of things-- a hobby, an art, a diversion, and even for those of us who are not published, many of us regard it as our art. Therefore, when we know, with almost a sixth sense, that what we are doing is no longer working, no longer our best, we stop.
At least, that is what I do. But I have been told that I am very odd.
~Lynae